Push-to-talk dictation for macOS. Hold right ⌥, speak, let go, and the text shows up where your cursor is, in any app.
Speech is recognised on your Mac with Whisper. Russian, English and Korean.
You need an Apple Silicon Mac with macOS 14 or later, and Xcode 26 (Swift 6.2).
git clone https://github.com/okoflow/dictate
cd dictate
make signing # once: lets macOS remember the permissions between builds
make bundle
open build/Dictate.appDictate lives in the menu bar. On first launch it downloads the speech model (about 600 MB) and prepares it, which takes a minute or so. When the menu says Ready, you can dictate.
macOS will ask for three permissions:
| Permission | What for |
|---|---|
| Microphone | recording while you hold the key |
| Accessibility | pasting into the field you're in |
| Input Monitoring | noticing the hotkey |
- Click into any text field.
- Hold right ⌥ and speak.
- Let go. The text appears in a second or two.
Give it a beat after pressing the key before you start talking, or the first syllable can get cut off.
The language is picked automatically. To pin one, use the menu: Language → Russian / English / Korean.
A few things it does on its own:
- Your clipboard is safe. Dictate pastes through the clipboard, then puts back whatever you had copied.
- Password fields are skipped. Nothing is typed there. If you need the text, use Copy last transcript in the menu.
- It won't paste into the wrong place. If you switched apps while it was working, the text goes to the clipboard instead, so just press ⌘V.
- Everything runs locally. The only thing Dictate downloads is the speech model, once.
- Audio stays in memory while you hold the key and is never saved.
- The dictated text is never written to logs.
To remove the model: rm -r ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dictate/Models ~/Library/Caches/dev.dictate.app
Right now Dictate types exactly what Whisper hears. Next up are modes that tidy the text: dropping "um"s offline, and optional LLM clean-up, formal tone and translation to English.
- How it works: pasting, recognition, known limits
- Development: tests, benchmarks, launch flags
- MIT License