Overview

Reed Dictation turns natural speech into clean text in any Mac app. Hold a shortcut, speak the way you think, and release: the text lands at your cursor in Mail, Slack, Notes, browsers or editors. Unlike cloud dictation tools, everything runs on your Mac. Speech recognition uses NVIDIA's Parakeet model on the Neural Engine, and a cleanup pass removes filler words, collapses restarted phrases to the version you meant, and adds punctuation. On macOS 26 or later it also uses on-device Apple Intelligence for harder sentences. There's no account, no analytics, and the app keeps the dictation path off the network. It's free and open source.

Pricing: Free. No subscription, no trial, no account. Open source under the Apache License 2.0.

Minimum macOS: 14.0 (Sonoma)

Architecture: Apple Silicon

Key Features

Hold-to-talk dictation into any app with a text cursor
On-device speech recognition (Parakeet), working offline after a one-time model download
Removes filler words like "um" and "uh" and keeps the version of a restarted phrase you meant
Optional on-device Apple Intelligence cleanup on macOS 26 or later
No account, subscription, analytics or crash reports
Free and open source (Apache 2.0)