Guide
Dictate to Claude Code from your iPhone
The best prompts are long: what you want, why, what to avoid, how you’ll check it. That’s a lot to type and easy to say. Macrophone lets you say it into your iPhone and have it land in Claude Code on your Mac.
What it looks like#
You lean back, pick up your phone and say “Claude Code,” then talk for a minute about the bug. You tap stop. A moment later the prompt appears in the Terminal tab running Claude Code, even if you were looking at another tab, without the ums and the “no, wait”. After a short countdown it's sent. Claude Code starts working while you're still holding the phone.
Or Claude asks you a question mid-task, waits, and carries on the moment you answer out loud.
Why it works well for prompting#
- Cleanup edits, it doesn't answer. Macrophone's cleanup is told to fix your words and never act on them. Say “write a function that sorts a list” and that's the sentence Claude gets, not a function.
- Your words, not a guess. Add library names, commands and acronyms to the dictionary, up to 50, so the recognizer hears them right.
- The right tab. Macrophone finds the Terminal tab by the program running in it, so
claudefinds Claude Code even when another tab is selected. If nothing matches, nothing is typed. - A moment to change your mind. Before Macrophone presses Enter, it shows the prompt with a countdown and a Cancel button. It only presses Enter in apps you've approved, and never for a dictation that was delayed.
- On your devices. Speech is transcribed and cleaned on the iPhone. Nothing goes through a server before it reaches your Mac.
Ways to connect it#
| Method | How | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Send to the tab | The ready-made Claude Code (Terminal) target; say “Claude Code, …” | Hands-free prompting |
| tmux | A profile that types into the pane running claude | Claude Code in tmux, or a hidden terminal |
| MCP | claude mcp add macrophone -- macrophone mcp | Claude asks, you answer out loud |
| Pull | Type ! mp in Claude Code | Bringing in something you already said |
The Claude Code recipe walks through each one, step by step. Prefer the Claude app? Talk to Claude desktop hands-free.
Speaking a good prompt#
- Start with the outcome: “I want uploads to survive a flaky connection.”
- Give the context you'd give a colleague: where the code is, what you tried.
- Say the limits: “Don't change the public API.”
- End with how you'll check it: “Add a test for the timeout case.”
Medium cleanup turns a minute of thinking out loud into a few tidy sentences. Heavy goes further and restructures it, which suits rambling but can drop nuance. The raw transcript is always one tap away.
What you need#
- An iPhone with iOS 17 or later. Cleanup needs one that supports Apple Intelligence, on iOS 26 or later.
- A Mac with macOS 14 or later, running Claude Code.
- Macrophone on both. It's free.