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
It formats lists for you
Say a list out loud and you get a list. Say a sentence and you get a sentence.
“One, call the bank. Two, send the invoice. Three, book the flight.”
arrives as a numbered list. Announce a count — “I have four
things to tell you” — and the four things that follow arrive
as bullets.
It would rather do nothing than guess.
Numbered lists only form when the numbers you speak start at one and climb
without gaps. Bulleted lists only form when the count you announced matches
the number of things you actually said. Anything else is left exactly as
you dictated it — because mangled text costs more to fix than
unformatted text does. This is plain pattern matching in the app, not a
language model, so nothing is sent anywhere to make it work.
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.