Voice Typing Chrome Extensions: Users and Ratings

Chrome users of voice input are spread very unevenly. Of the 20 extensions we track ¹, one has about a million users, a handful have hundreds of thousands, and the rest sit in the low thousands or below. The largest, Tactiq, shows 1,000,000 users ² on the Chrome Web Store as of October 19, 2026. It transcribes meetings, so it is not a tool for typing into a page. The largest extension built to dictate into any text field is Voice In, with 700,000 users ³.

Ratings do not follow size. The free, general-purpose speech-to-text extensions with large audiences tend to score lower than small, specialized tools. If you are choosing a way to write in the browser, install count tells you what is popular, not what works well.

Meeting transcribers hold the biggest audiences

The meeting-notes group is small in count, with four extensions, but it holds the top of the table. Tactiq leads with 1,000,000 users ². Read AI follows with 400,000 users ⁴, then Fireflies.ai with 100,000 users ⁵ and Krisp with 50,000 users ⁶.

Why these lead is easy to see. A meeting tool is installed once per workplace, often pushed by a team, and it solves a task people already have: a record of what was said on a call. Dictation into a document asks for a change of habit. A meeting transcriber asks only that you press record.

Tactiq also has the strongest evidence of satisfaction. Its rating comes from thousands of reviews, which is far more than any other row in the group. The others in the group are rated by dozens or a couple of hundred people, so their scores are less certain.

General speech-to-text extensions are popular but rated lower

The browser-extension group is the largest, with eight rows, and it mixes the best-known free tools. Voice In sits at 700,000 users ³. Voice Control for ChatGPT has 400,000 users ⁷, and Speech to Text (Voice Recognition) has 300,000 users ⁸. Dictation for Gmail shows 100,000 users ⁹.

Several of these have the lowest star ratings in the whole dataset, including Dictation for Gmail, Speech to Text (Voice Recognition) and Voice Control for ChatGPT. Voice In is the exception: it has a large audience and a much better score, backed by thousands of reviews. Many extensions in this group rely on the speech recognition built into Chrome, so their accuracy depends on that engine and on your microphone, not on anything the extension adds.

The pattern is common in app stores. A free tool that does one obvious job collects installs from people who try it once. Some of those users leave a low rating when it fails on their accent, vocabulary or noisy room, and the install stays on the count anyway.

Newer dictation apps are small but well liked

The dictation-app group has five rows, and all are modest in size. Voicy has 10,000 users ¹⁴. Voice Notebook has 7,000 users ¹⁵, Spokenly has 4,000 users ¹⁶, Contextli has 928 users ¹⁷, and Dictation Daddy has 1,000 users ¹⁸.

Their scores are mostly good, with Voicy the strongest of the group and Voice Notebook the weakest. But the scores rest on small numbers of reviews, from a few dozen to about a hundred. A handful of enthusiastic early users can lift a rating, and a few unhappy ones can sink it. Read these scores as a hint, not a verdict.

Many of these tools are companions to a full app on a computer or phone, so the Chrome listing may capture only part of their real audience.

Voice notes and professional tools are the smallest groups

Two voice-note tools appear: AudioPen with 7,000 users ¹⁹ and Voicenotes with 6,000 users ²⁰. Both turn spoken thoughts into written notes, and both are rated well by a few dozen reviewers.

Nabla, the one medical and professional tool, has 20,000 users ²¹ and a perfect score from a small number of reviews. A tool for clinicians is aimed at a narrow audience, so a modest count is expected. It says little about quality or about how widely the underlying product is used outside the browser.

Where the evidence disagrees or falls short

Install counts and star ratings point in different directions. By users, meeting transcribers and free general tools lead. By stars, small and specialized tools often do better. Neither measure is wrong, but they answer different questions: one shows reach, the other shows how satisfied a small share of users were.

Some limits matter more than any single row:

• Rounded figures. The store rounds large counts. A listing that shows 30,000 users ¹⁰ may be a little above or below that number.
• Installs, not use. The store counts installs that are switched on, whether or not they are used. Someone who installed an extension once and never dictates with it still counts.
• Double counting. The same person on two computers counts twice, so users are not unique people.
• Different jobs. A meeting transcriber and a tool that types into Gmail serve different needs, so comparing their audiences says little about which is better at dictation.
• Thin ratings. Several scores come from fewer than a few dozen reviews, and the store does not say how many reviewers were verified users.
• One platform. Chrome is only part of the picture. Many dictation tools live as desktop or mobile apps, and people also use Edge, Safari and Firefox, none of which is covered here.

The data is a snapshot from one day. It shows who has an audience now, not how that audience is changing.

What this means if you want to write by voice in Chrome

Start with what you need the tool to do. If you want to record and summarize calls, the meeting transcribers are the proven choice, and Tactiq has by far the most users and the most reviews. If you want to speak into emails and documents, a general dictation extension is the closest match, and Voice In is the one with both a large audience and a strong score.

Be cautious with the most-installed free tools. A high install count, such as the 400,000 users ⁷ of Voice Control for ChatGPT, shows that many people tried it, not that they stayed. Check the star rating and the number of reviews before you rely on it for real work.

If you write by voice every day, consider whether a browser extension is the right layer. Extensions work only inside Chrome, depend on the browser's speech recognition and can break when a site changes. A dictation app that works across every program is often a better fit for long documents. For how browser tools compare with apps on the computer, see our overview of apps and browsers. For where these extensions sit among all dictation products, see the market overview.

Last, test before you commit. Install two or three candidates, dictate the same paragraph into each in your usual room with your usual microphone, and compare how many words you have to fix. Your own accent, vocabulary and background noise decide the outcome more than any store rating can.

The full table

Every extension we track is listed below with its kind, its users, its star rating and its number of ratings.