Add Tasks to Todoist and Reminders by Voice

Capturing a task should take a second, not a detour into typing. On a Mac you can speak a task straight into Todoist or Apple Reminders, get clean punctuated text, and keep your whole day of to-dos on the device. Here is how it works and how to set it up.

Why capture tasks by voice at all?

The whole point of a task manager is friction-free capture. If logging a to-do means stopping, clicking into a field and typing a full sentence, half of your ideas never make it in. Voice removes that friction. Most people speak around three to four times faster than they type, so a task you would have skipped gets captured in the time it takes to say it out loud.

This is the same reason dictation pays off for longer writing. If you already dictate emails on your Mac or draft thousands of words by voice, adding tasks is a natural extension of the same muscle: cursor in the field, speak, done.

How voice task entry actually works on a Mac

There is a common misconception that you need a dedicated Todoist or Reminders voice feature. You do not. Both apps are ordinary Mac apps with ordinary text fields, and a system-wide dictation tool types wherever your cursor is blinking. That means the exact same shortcut you use to fill a search bar or a chat box also fills a task field.

Under the hood, an on-device tool listens to your microphone, runs a local speech model such as Whisper or Parakeet, and pastes the result into the active field. No audio is uploaded, and because the model lives on your Mac it keeps working even when you are offline. Only your task app's own sync needs the internet, and that is a separate step from the transcription.

Set it up in four steps

1. Install a system-wide dictation tool. On Mac, BlaBlaType runs speech recognition locally and types into any app. Grant it accessibility permission on first launch so it can paste text.
2. Open your task field. In Todoist, hit the quick-add box. In Apple Reminders, create a new reminder and place your cursor on the title line.
3. Press your shortcut and speak. Say the task naturally, including the due date if you want: "Email the design team the revised logo, due tomorrow at 9."
4. Let AI cleanup polish it. Filler words and stray punctuation get removed, so a clean single-line task lands in the field. Then let Todoist or Reminders parse the date.

Myth vs fact: voice task entry on Mac

Todoist vs Reminders by voice: what to expect

The dictation experience is identical across both apps because the tool just types text. The difference is what each app does with that text afterward, especially how it reads dates and priorities.

In practice, dictate the whole line including natural phrases like "every Monday" or "next Friday", and let each app's own smart parser turn that text into a due date. Todoist tends to catch more of the shorthand, but both handle everyday phrasing well. If you use a custom dictionary for project names or teammate names, add them once so they transcribe correctly every time.

Privacy: your to-do list says a lot about you

A task list is a quiet diary of your work, health, finances and family. That is exactly why the capture method matters. Cloud voice assistants upload the audio of everything you say to a server for processing. On-device dictation does not: the speech model runs on your Mac, so your voice and the resulting task text stay put. If you already keep a voice journal in Day One or dictate into Arc and Brave, the same local-first principle applies to your tasks.

BlaBlaType pairs this with on-device AI cleanup powered by Apple Intelligence, so the polishing happens locally too. For hands-free control at the system level, some users layer a scripting tool like Talon on top, though for plain task capture a dictation shortcut is all you need. See plans and the free trial if you want to test the workflow before committing.