inlaut
Local push-to-talk dictation for the Mac, free and open source
Overview
inlaut is a menu bar app that does one thing: hold a key, speak, let go, and the text is pasted at the cursor in any app. Speech recognition runs entirely on the Mac (Parakeet Ultra as Core ML on the Neural Engine), so nothing is sent to a server and it works offline. One model handles English, German and sentences that mix both. There is no AI rewriting; it writes what you say.
Pricing: Free, open source (GPL-3.0), no account, no subscription
Minimum macOS: 26.0 (Tahoe)
Architecture: Apple Silicon
Key Features
- Hold a shortcut or the fn/Globe key to dictate; double-tap fn for hands-free dictation
- Fully on-device speech recognition, works without internet after the one-time model download (about 630 MB)
- English, German and both mixed in one sentence
- Custom replacements for names and technical terms
- Voice commands "new line" and "new paragraph"
- About 50 MB of app memory while idle; no recordings or history are stored
Tags
inlaut Alternatives
Reed Dictation
Hold, speak, release: clean text at your cursor, all on your Mac
Handy
Free and open-source speech to text that works completely offline
Hex
Press and hold a hotkey to turn your voice into text anywhere on Mac
Ghost Pepper
100% local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS