Why your dictation app has a cat in it

There is a cat in your dictation app. If you talk enough, it gets a beanie.

We should probably explain.

Talking to your Mac is a habit, not a skill

Dictation today is genuinely good. The reason most people still type is not that talking works badly. It is that typing is what your hands already do without thinking, and habits only change when something keeps pulling you back until the new thing becomes automatic.

So YappYapp borrowed the strongest habit trick ever invented, the Tamagotchi, and pointed it at your talking:

• Every dictation feeds your pet. The more words you say, the faster it grows. At level 3 your pet earns a beanie. Level 6, a party hat. Level 10, a halo.
• Daily quests ("say 300 words today") and streaks give you a small reason to press the key today, not someday.
• New pets hatch from eggs when you hit real milestones. Talk enough and the ghost wakes up. Keep a three-day streak and the penguin arrives. The dragon needs ten thousand words, and it will remember if you stop showing up.

And because this is YappYapp: your pet's whole life story is saved in one small file on your Mac. Nobody else ever sees how much you talk, not even us.

The pets do not lie either

The same house rule that governs the whole app applies to the pets: no lying. You can save a little recap card to your Desktop to show off your week. If your streak broke, the card says so. If those words were from last week, it will not pretend they were from this one. When the numbers look good, they are really yours.

Fourteen of them

Cat, dog, and crab are the starters. The ghost floats. The snail is contractually slow (we wrote that down, officially). The unicorn only appears for people who raise any pet to level 10, which means the unicorn has watched you talk for a very long time and respects you.

A few of them are walking around this website right now. Say hi.