For macOS
Hold a key. Speak. Your words appear.
Dictate is push-to-talk dictation for the Mac. Hold Fn, say what you mean, release, and the text lands in whatever app has focus. Recognition runs entirely on your Mac, so nothing you say leaves the machine.
Version 0.1.1 · macOS 26 or later · 4.2 MB · Notarized by Apple · Free · Installs as Dictate.app
Private by default
Every word is transcribed on your Mac's Neural Engine with Apple's on-device speech models. No account, no subscription, and no audio streamed to anyone's server. It works on airplane mode. This is the whole reason Dictate exists: dictation as good as the paid tools, without your voice leaving the machine.
What you get
Push-to-talk, or hands-free
Hold Fn (or Right ⌘, your choice) and release to insert. A quick tap instead of a hold locks dictation on for hands-free use. Tap again to stop and insert.
Types into any app
Mail, Slack, your editor, a terminal. Anywhere you can type, you can dictate. The text pastes into whatever field has focus, so there is no app to switch to and no transcript to copy out of somewhere.
It learns from your edits
Fix a mistranscribed word after it pastes and Dictate notices through the Accessibility API. Once it sees the same correction twice, it applies the fix for you before inserting. Undo a correction and it unlearns it. Password fields are never read.
Cleanup on your terms
Filler words like "um" and "uh" are stripped on-device. Past that, cleanup is a setting: off, Apple Intelligence on-device, or your own API key for Claude or any OpenAI-compatible local server. One rule holds no matter what: if a cleanup request fails, the raw transcript is inserted anyway. Dictation that eats your words is worse than no dictation.
A HUD that shows it is listening
A floating pill shows your mic level and the live transcript while you speak, in one of five meter styles. Prefer no chrome? Hide the menu bar icon entirely and the hotkey still works.
Recent dictations
Press ⌃⌥⌘V for the last hour of dictations and click one to copy it. The history lives in memory only and clears when the app quits.
Dictate is open source, built on the VoiceKit Swift package. It is signed and notarized, collects nothing, and phones home to no one. It needs macOS 26, which is where Apple's on-device SpeechTranscriber lives.