Everything you might wonder about Upsurge — what it does, what happens to your voice, and how to get going. Tap a question to open it.
Upsurge turns your voice into clean, ready-to-send text — anywhere you can type. You talk the way you naturally would, with all the “ums,” restarts and rambling, and Upsurge strips the filler, fixes the grammar and hands back a polished message.
Speaking is about 3× faster than typing, so you say more in less time — and it sounds like you wrote it carefully, not like a raw transcript.
Anywhere typing slows you down, you just talk instead. A few things people use it for every day:
On iPhone you send in one tap or copy the clean text into any app. On Mac you hold your shortcut in any app — mail, chats, docs, code — and the text lands right where your cursor is.
You say: “um so like can we maybe push the standup to like 10 tomorrow i think that works better for everyone”
Upsurge sends: “Can we push tomorrow's standup to 10? I think that works better for everyone.”
Same meaning, none of the mess — and it keeps your intent and tone, it doesn't rewrite what you actually said.
No. Upsurge records only while you hold your dictation key or after you tap the mic, and it stops the instant you let go. There's no always-on listening, no wake word and no background recording.
When you dictate, the audio is sent to our service, transcribed and cleaned by trusted AI providers acting on our behalf (ElevenLabs for speech recognition and Anthropic for cleanup), and the finished text comes straight back to your app.
Your message history lives on your device and in your own iCloud if you turn sync on — we don't keep a copy. We don't sell your data, and we never use your dictations to train models.
No. Your audio is used only to produce your text, then discarded — and the finished text isn't kept on our servers either. The only things we hold are anonymous, aggregate signals (like that a dictation happened and how long it was) and the short list of names Upsurge learns so it spells them right (see below) — never your messages.
Full details are in our Privacy Policy.
Yes — that's how it learns to write a colleague's name or your product properly instead of guessing at it every time. Upsurge notes proper nouns it spots in your dictations and keeps only those words against your anonymous token — never the message they came from. A word starts helping transcription only after it has come up a few times.
They expire on their own after about four months without dictating, and you can see the list, remove any word, or clear it entirely in the app.
Your history lives on your device, and syncs through your own private iCloud if you turn sync on. It never reaches our servers — which is precisely why we can't read it.
You don't need to pay for iCloud. History is text — kilobytes. Thousands of dictations add up to a couple of megabytes, so the free 5 GB tier covers it many times over. People pay for iCloud because of photos and backups, not because of Upsurge.
No iCloud, or sync switched off? Everything still works — your history simply stays on that one device instead of following you to your others. The switch is in Settings.
No sign-up, no email, no card. On first launch the app creates an anonymous token so your requests can be authenticated — and that's it. Your Apple ID (via iCloud) is all that ties your history across your own devices.
Upsurge holds the same privacy line at work: your audio is never stored, nothing is ever used to train models, and we don't sell data. Messages stay on your device and in your own iCloud — not on our servers. The cleanup step runs through Anthropic's Claude under a configuration that doesn't retain or train on your content.
Upsurge learns your company's names, products and jargon from your own dictations, so they get spelled right over time — that dictionary is yours alone, not shared with anyone. If your organization needs a formal data-processing agreement or has specific compliance requirements, get in touch and we'll work with you.
Both. Every new install starts with a 14-day trial of translation, the AI speech coach and the full stats. After the trial you keep dictating free — those three become part of Pro. Dictation on iPhone always has a weekly word allowance, during the trial and after it; the app shows you where you stand, in Settings. Upsurge for Mac is free with no dictation limit, and Pro is not required there.
Upsurge Pro is a monthly or yearly subscription — the App Store shows your local price before you confirm. It renews automatically until you cancel, and you cancel any time in your Apple ID subscription settings. No card is needed to start, and the Mac app is a free download.
You can dictate in 100+ languages (speech recognition runs on ElevenLabs), and Upsurge can translate what you said into 100+ languages — say it in one language, send it in another. On iPhone, translation is part of Pro; on Mac it is free. The app itself is available in English, Russian, German, French and Spanish.
That's exactly what it's built for. Upsurge uses top-tier speech models and learns the names, jargon and terms you use often, so proper nouns get spelled right over time. Half-finished sentences, fillers and self-corrections are cleaned up automatically.
Same brain, different reach. On iPhone you dictate and send in one tap to your favorite messengers, or copy the clean text into any app. On Mac you hold your shortcut in any app — mail, chats, docs, code — and the cleaned text lands right where your cursor is, no copy-paste.
Your history syncs between them through your own iCloud, so a note dictated on your phone is there on your Mac. The words Upsurge learns are held per device, though — teach it a name on your iPhone and the Mac won't know it yet, because each app registers on its own without an account tying them together.
On iPhone, install it from the App Store, open it and allow the microphone — that's the whole setup, about a minute. There's no account to create.
The Mac app is a direct, notarized download that keeps itself up to date. Both start from the home page.
Upsurge needs an internet connection to dictate — the transcription and cleanup run on our servers, which is what lets a tiny app produce such polished text and spell your terms right. Your saved history stays available offline on your device; you just need to be online at the moment you record.
We'd love to hear it — email hello@heyvoxly.com and we'll get back to you.
Support Upsurge on LinkedIn