Hold a hotkey. Speak. Release. Your words appear at the cursor — in any app, in any language, 100% on your Mac. No cloud. No telemetry. No friction.
Free · Open source · GPL-3.0 · Apple-notarised · macOS 14 Sonoma and later
No tabs to switch. No buttons to click. Just hold your hotkey and talk — the words land wherever your cursor already is.
One global hotkey works in every app — Slack, Mail, Xcode, your browser. Press, speak, release. Your transcript pastes at the cursor instantly.
Local Whisper and NVIDIA Parakeet models run entirely on your Mac. Your voice never touches a server. Ever.
Pipe the raw transcript through Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, or a local CLI to clean grammar, format as email, prettify code — your call.
Auto-swap settings per app. Casual tone in Slack, professional in Mail, verbatim in your code editor. Set it once, forget it.
Track your WPM vs. typing, time saved, and your dictation pace against the world record (Barbara Blackburn — 212 WPM sustained).
Teach it your jargon, names, and spellings. The transcription will use your terms — even when the model has never heard them.
Built for macOS 26 Tahoe with the new design language. Graceful fallback to ultra-thin material on macOS 14 and 15.
Whisper supports nearly every language on Earth. Parakeet V2 is English-only but blazingly fast on Apple Silicon.
No subscription. No paywalls. No license keys. Open source, GPL-3, made because typing is too slow.
Download the DMG, drag to Applications, double-click to open. Apple-notarised — no warnings.
Microphone (to hear you) and Accessibility (to paste at the cursor). One-time.
Set your push-to-talk shortcut. Most people use the right Option key. That's it.
All transcription is local by default. Optional cloud LLMs run only if you supply an API key. Optional clipboard or window-context capture is processed locally and sent only to the model you chose. No telemetry. No analytics. No phone-home. Ever.
Honest comparisons against the apps people consider before landing here.
$15/month, cloud round-trip, polished. We're free and on-device.
Same on-device approach. We're open-source and ship Parakeet V2.
They're great at file transcription. We're built for live dictation.
Neuron Flame is a fork with a Liquid-Glass redesign and Parakeet default.
What macOS Dictation should be — better hotkeys, dictionary, AI cleanup.
NVIDIA's English ASR model, ANE-optimised. The default in Neuron Flame.
Code-mode dictionary, Power Mode for editors, dictate commits and reviews.
Drafts at thinking speed. Voice-preserving AI cleanup. Per-app personalities.
RSI-friendly, dyslexia-friendly, hands-free. On-device by default.
Full Whisper family bundled with whisper.cpp + a UI. No build steps.
Zero telemetry. Local-by-default. Open source under GPL-3.
Yes. No subscription, no license key, no paywall. Neuron Flame is open source under GPL-3 — feel free to read the source and verify exactly what the app does on your behalf.
Whisper (by OpenAI, ported to whisper.cpp) supports 100+ languages and runs on any Mac. Parakeet V2 (by NVIDIA, via FluidAudio) is English-only but optimised for the Apple Neural Engine — much faster. Parakeet is the default. Switch any time on the AI Models tab.
It shouldn't anymore — Neuron Flame is now Apple-notarised. macOS verifies the signature on first launch and you'll see a brief "downloaded from the internet" confirmation, then the app opens normally. If you have an older download from before notarisation, grab a fresh DMG from this page and replace your installed copy.
Completely. The default Parakeet model and any Whisper model you download run entirely on-device. The only thing requiring internet is optional AI enhancement via cloud LLMs — and that's purely opt-in.
Any Mac running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Apple Silicon strongly recommended for Parakeet. Liquid Glass UI activates automatically on macOS 26 Tahoe; older versions get the ultra-thin material fallback.
Read the documentation first — it covers every feature in detail. For bugs or feature requests, open an issue on GitHub. For everything else, head to the support page.
It's free. It's local. It just works.
Download Neuron Flame