From silence to typeset,
in about five minutes.

What TalkToLaTeX does

You speak mathematics out loud; it lands as real, compiled LaTeX right at your cursor. Your voice is transcribed by OpenAI Whisper, turned into clean LaTeX by Claude, and inserted exactly where you were typing — no copy-paste, no syntax to remember.

The fastest way in is the Chrome extension for Overleaf, which inserts straight into the Source editor. There's also a native macOS app that pastes at your system cursor anywhere you can type, with Windows coming. This guide focuses on the Overleaf extension; the desktop note is at the end.

Get the Chrome extension

The extension is currently distributed as an unpacked folder — it's coming to the Chrome Web Store, but for now you load it by hand. It takes about a minute.

1. Download the project so you have the extension/ folder on disk (the one containing manifest.json).
2. Open chrome://extensions in Chrome.
3. Toggle Developer mode on — it's the switch in the top-right corner.
4. Click Load unpacked, then select the extension/ folder.
5. The TalkToLaTeX icon appears in your toolbar. Click the puzzle-piece menu and pin it so the popup is one click away.

Sign in or create an account

Accounts route through a hosted backend that holds the API keys server-side, so there are no API keys for you to manage. You just sign in with an email and password, and the backend makes the OpenAI and Anthropic calls on your behalf.

1. Click the TalkToLaTeX toolbar icon to open the popup.
2. In the Account card, enter your email and a password (8+ characters).
3. Click Create account the first time, or Sign in if you already have one. The badge flips to Signed in.

That's it — your account authenticates you to the backend, which enforces usage limits and a spend cap. The provider keys never touch your browser, and you can Sign out anytime from the same card.

Enable your microphone

Recording happens right on the Overleaf page, so the microphone is a normal per-site permission for overleaf.com — granted in context, exactly where you'd expect it. You do this once.

1. Open an Overleaf project and trigger a dictation for the first time (see the next step).
2. A small “Enable microphone” button appears in the bottom-right of the page. Click it — that click is what lets Chrome show its prompt.
3. Chrome asks to allow the mic for overleaf.com. Click Allow — recording starts immediately, and you're never asked again.

Speak your first equation

Open a project on Overleaf and make sure you're in the Source editor (the code view) — not the Visual / Rich-Text editor. Insertion targets the underlying CodeMirror source.

1. Click into the editor so your cursor sits exactly where you want the LaTeX.
2. Press the hotkey — default Ctrl Shift 9 (use ⌘ instead of Ctrl on macOS) — to start recording.
3. Speak your math naturally: “the integral from zero to one of e to the minus x squared dx.”
4. Press the hotkey again to stop. The LaTeX appears at your cursor.

A small on-page indicator walks through the stages — recording → transcribing → converting → inserting — and the inserted text lands with proper undo history, so a single Ctrl/⌘ Z removes it cleanly.

On the desktop app, you also get gestures

The macOS app uses a global hotkey (default Right Option, ⌥) and supports hold-to-talk plus a hands-free toggle:

What gets inserted

Clean LaTeX, ready to compile — the tool outputs only document content, with no code fences or commentary. It decides the wrapper for you:

• Short expressions come back inline as $…$.
• Long, standalone equations come back in an equation environment.
• Plain prose — a sentence with no math — passes straight through as prose.
• Named objects like the Minkowski matrix, the Pauli matrices, or the identity matrix are inserted as the actual object, never a text placeholder.

Required preamble

The generated LaTeX assumes amsmath and amssymb are loaded — they're needed for matrices, \mathbb, \text, aligned environments and more. Add these two lines to your document preamble or it won't compile:

\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amssymb}

The popup has a one-click Copy preamble button for exactly these lines. Since the tool inserts into the document body, it can't edit your preamble for you — this is a quick one-time step (the same requirement as the desktop app).

If something's off

The common snags are quick to clear — here's what each symptom usually means.

Desktop apps

Prefer to dictate math anywhere, not just in Overleaf? The native macOS app pastes LaTeX at your system cursor — in your local TeX editor, Markdown notes, Slack, anywhere you can type. It adds the hold-to-talk and hands-free gestures shown in step 4. Windows is coming next.