LiveTranscribe

Live Transcribe is a free, open-source dictation app for Apple silicon Macs. Hold fn (🌐), speak and let go: it turns what you said into clean, punctuated text and types it at your cursor in almost any app, including email, chat, documents, browsers, code editors and terminals.

Speech recognition (Parakeet) and a small language model (Qwen3) run on your Mac with MLX, so your audio and transcripts never leave it. There is no account, no cloud and no telemetry, and once the models are downloaded (about 3.5 GB) it works offline.

Features:

• Removes filler words and fixes punctuation and capitals
• Follows your corrections: "Monday, no wait, Tuesday" becomes "Tuesday"
• Lays out spoken lists, letters and line breaks in apps that take several lines
• Snippets: say "my calendar link" to insert saved text
• Custom vocabulary, so names and jargon are spelled your way
• Four cleanup levels, from None to High, and ⌃⌥Z to put back exactly what you said
• Hands-free mode: double-tap the key and it keeps listening
• A live transcript window for longer sessions
• Dictation history that stays on your Mac, and can be turned off
• Recognises and cleans up a sentence in about 0.2 seconds on an M4 Pro

Requires macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon. English only. MIT licensed.