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Built-in voice shortcuts and 1 preconfigured Custom Utility are available on every plan. Custom voice shortcuts are capped at 3 on the free plan. Pro unlocks unlimited voice shortcuts, unlimited Custom Utilities, custom utility prompts, and the webhook / script actions.

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Voice Shortcuts

Voice Shortcuts are voice-triggered actions. Speak a trigger phrase while in transcription mode and Vowen executes an action instead of pasting text. They live under Voice Shortcuts in the left sidebar.

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Built-in Voice Shortcuts

Eight ship enabled. The trigger is a bare phrase, not a sentence. Say the trigger, then your query, with nothing in between. So you say “google best pizza near me”, not “search Google for best pizza near me”. Each one can be switched off individually on the Voice Shortcuts page.
Recognises Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Pictures, Music, Movies (Videos on Windows), Home, and on macOS also Applications. Singular and plural both work, and a trailing word is ignored, so “open downloads folder” works.If nothing matches, the voice shortcut declines and the text is pasted normally.

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How Voice Shortcut Triggers Work

Vowen matches your transcribed speech against every enabled trigger in three tiers:
1

Exact prefix

The transcript starts with the trigger phrase.
2

Aliases and filler stripping

Leading politeness and filler words (“can you”, “could you”, “please”, “hey”, “okay”, “ok”, “um”, “uh”, “so”, “well”, “like”) are stripped and the result is compared again. Built-ins also carry known speech-to-text variants, so “ask clawed”, “ask chat gbt”, “hey google” and “you tube” all land on the right voice shortcut.
3

Fuzzy prefix

A Levenshtein similarity of at least 0.75 against the trigger or one of its aliases.
Vowen scans triggers longest first. On a tie, your custom voice shortcuts win over built-ins, so shipping a new built-in can never break a voice shortcut you already had. The text after the trigger phrase becomes the query for the action.

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Voice Shortcut Actions

A custom voice shortcut is a trigger phrase plus a numbered list of actions, added from chips underneath. There are five action types, and a single voice shortcut can combine as many of them as you like.
”Search” is not an action type. The built-in searches are just Websites actions with the search engine’s query URL, which is exactly how you build your own.
Use {{text}} anywhere in a website URL, a webhook URL, header or body, or a script command, and Vowen substitutes what you said after the trigger. For example a voice shortcut with the trigger search amazon and the URL amazon.com/s?k={{text}} turns “search amazon noise cancelling headphones” into an Amazon results page. A URL with no scheme gets https:// prefixed, and the braces are never percent-encoded, so {{text}} survives intact.
The Voice Shortcuts page with a custom voice shortcut, the highlighted Create Voice Shortcut card, and built-in voice shortcuts such as google, ask claude and youtube

Custom voice shortcuts sit above the built-in ones. Create Voice Shortcut opens the editor.

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Choosing a Browser and Profile

Each voice shortcut has its own Open in control for its Websites action. Leave it on Default browser and Vowen hands the URL to the system default. Pick a specific browser and it launches that one directly. Vowen detects these browsers: When the browser you picked supports profiles, a Profile dropdown appears next to it, listing the profiles that browser has on disk. Chromium browsers are launched with --profile-directory, Firefox-family browsers with -P. Safari is deliberately profile-less. Its data directory is protected by macOS privacy controls and Safari has no command-line profile selector, so there is nothing to offer. Detection is read-only and prompt-free. Vowen reads profiles from files that belong to non-sandboxed apps, so building the list never triggers a “wants to access data from other apps” or “wants to control Google Chrome” permission prompt.
Fallbacks are silent and deliberate. If the browser you picked has since been uninstalled, the profile was deleted, or the launch fails for any reason, the page opens in your default browser instead of showing an error.
On Windows, browsers beyond the list above can still be detected through the Start Menu registry, but they get no profile support because profile storage is vendor-specific.

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Launching Applications

The Applications action lists apps installed on your machine. Turn on Open with a specific folder and you can give each app a folder to open with, which is what makes “open standup” launch your editor on the right project. If an app cannot accept a folder, it just opens normally. On Windows, Vowen enumerates two kinds of app:
  • Desktop apps, resolved from Start Menu shortcuts to their executable.
  • Microsoft Store / UWP apps, which have no shortcut or executable at all. These are found by their App User Model ID and launched through the shell apps folder. Opening a Store app with a specific folder is not supported, so those always launch plain.

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Custom Scripts on Windows

The Script action requires Pro.
On macOS and Linux, scripts run with /bin/bash. On Windows, Vowen probes for the shells actually installed and offers whichever it finds in a Shell dropdown: The dropdown only appears when more than one shell was found. Scripts are specific to the machine’s shell and will not necessarily run on another operating system.

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Custom Utilities Pro

Custom Utilities are shortcut-triggered AI prompts that need no voice recording. They gather context (selected text and clipboard) and send it to your AI provider.
The Create Voice Shortcut dialog with a Trigger field and an Action block, plus chips for Applications, Folders, Webhook and Scripts

The voice shortcut editor: the trigger phrase you say, and the actions it runs. Actions can be websites, apps, folders, webhooks or scripts.

They live in Configure your AI > Command Mode, at the bottom of the tab, and only appear once an AI provider is connected.

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Creating a Custom Utility

1

Open Configure your AI

Click Configure your AI in the left sidebar, then switch to the Command Mode tab.
2

Create the utility

Scroll to the utilities section and click Create custom utility.
3

Name it and record a shortcut

The shortcut needs at least one modifier plus one regular key. Vowen refuses a combination already used by one of your global shortcuts or by another utility.
4

Pick a template

Six presets ship: Fix Grammar, Make Professional, Polish Text, Summarize, Bullet Points, and Rewrite as Email. Choosing Custom prompt instead lets you write your own and requires Pro.

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Template Variables

Custom prompts support exactly two variables:

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Example Custom Prompts

Proofread Selection Proofread and fix any errors in this text, preserving the original meaning: {{selected_text}} Summarize Clipboard Summarize this in 3 bullet points: {{clipboard}} Translate Selection Translate this to Spanish: {{selected_text}}

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What Happens When You Trigger One

The result arrives in the paste confirmation banner, the same one Command Mode uses, with Tab to paste, Esc to dismiss, and a Copy action. Nothing is written into your document until you choose to paste. If your prompt uses {{selected_text}} and nothing is selected, Vowen tells you to highlight something first instead of sending an empty prompt. The same applies to {{clipboard}} with an empty clipboard.

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Requirements

  • An AI provider must be connected. Utilities are hidden until then.
  • Utilities have a 500ms debounce so a double-tap of the shortcut cannot fire two runs.