Hold a key.
Talk.

Your words appear wherever you're typing — email, Slack, a document, anywhere.

On-device transcription. Your voice never leaves your Mac.

Download for Mac

206 MB · Apple Silicon · macOS 13 or later

Getting started

1

Drag it to Applications

Open the download and drag Dictation across. Then open it.

2

Let it set up once

The first launch downloads the speech model — about 2.3 GB. It shows a progress window and only does this once.

3

Say yes to three permissions

Microphone to hear you, Accessibility to place the text, Input Monitoring to notice the hotkey. macOS asks for each.

4

Hold right-option and speak

Let go and your words are typed at the cursor. Double-tap right ⌥ instead to go hands-free, then tap again to stop.

The orb tells you what it's doing

There's no window. A small circle sits in the bottom-right corner of your screen, level with the Dock.

FadedIdle, waiting
RedListening — it grows with your voice
GreenTranscribing what you said

Before you download

Needs an Apple Silicon Mac — M1 or newer. An Intel Mac won't run it.
Needs macOS 13 (Ventura) or later.
Set aside 2.6 GB — the app plus the speech model it fetches on first launch.

Transcription runs on your Mac's own neural engine, through Apple's MLX framework. There is no server, no account, and no API key — because there is nothing to connect to.

Why this is private

Your speech is turned into text entirely on your own machine, by a model that lives in the app. No audio is uploaded. No transcript is uploaded. There is no account to create and no company on the other end of it — including us.

Your audioNever leaves the Mac. Held in memory, discarded after transcribing.
Your textGoes to your clipboard and into whatever you're typing. Nowhere else.
Works offlineTurn the Wi-Fi off and it behaves identically.
The one exception, stated plainly: the first time you open the app it downloads the speech model — about 2.3 GB, once. That is the only time it uses the network. After that it never connects again, and it does not check for updates, send analytics, or report usage.