Talk, and your words land wherever you type.

Press fn, speak, and SimpleWhisper types it into Word, Teams, VS Code, Mail or any other app. Transcribed on your Mac, free and open source.

Download for macOS macOS 26 on Apple Silicon. No account, no subscription.

Live typing: dictated text appears in the HUD editor as you speak

Live typing: words appear as you speak, greyed while provisional, then confirmed at each pause.

One key, any app

Tap fn to start and stop, or hold it to talk. The text goes wherever the cursor is.

Stays on your Mac

Whisper, Parakeet and Apple Speech run locally on Apple Silicon. A cloud engine is there only if you choose it.

Polish it with AI

Prompts clean up, format or translate a dictation. Command mode rewrites selected text with a spoken instruction.

Tap, talk, done

A small HUD appears next to the caret while you speak. Tap fn again and the transcription is pasted in place. Esc cancels at any moment.

Always know what it is doing

The HUD shows the microphone level while recording, a rainbow edge while transcribing and while an AI prompt runs, and folds away when it is done.

HUD states: recording, transcribing, processing, cancelled

It floats in Liquid Glass, tinted with one of nine colours.

Prompts and commands

Pick a prompt from the HUD, or press its letter while recording: Clean up, Formal email, Bullet points, Translate to English, or your own.

Select text, say what to do with it and press Control: the selection is replaced with the result. With nothing selected, your question goes to the assistant.

Works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, your own shell command, the Claude, OpenAI and Gemini APIs, or Apple Intelligence.

Nowhere to paste? It waits for you

Dictating over a Finder window or a web page with no text field? The text stays in the HUD, still editable, with Copy and Close.

History and settings

Keep a history of dictations if you want one, and tune models, hotkeys, the HUD, languages, vocabulary, voice macros and AI providers.

History window — History: click to copy, play to paste again.

Speech models

Model	Runs	Good for
Whisper Large v3 Turbo	On device, ~1.6 GB	Best quality, many languages
Whisper Large v3	On device, 626 MB	Smaller download
Whisper Small	On device, ~200 MB	Quick tests
Parakeet v3	On device, ~0.6 GB	Very fast, 25 European languages
Parakeet Ultra	On device, ~0.6 GB	Parakeet v3 post-trained for accuracy
Apple Speech	Built into macOS	No download
Gemini API	Cloud, your API key	Optional; the recording is sent to Google

A silence and hallucination filter keeps invented phrases like “Thank you.” out of your text.

Install

Download the latest SimpleWhisper zip, unzip it and move SimpleWhisper to Applications.
The app is not notarized yet, so clear the quarantine flag once:
```
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/SimpleWhisper.app
```
Open it and allow Microphone, Accessibility and Input Monitoring when asked.
Press fn and start talking. Turn on automatic updates in Settings › General › Updates.

Full documentation, hotkeys and building from source are in the README.