My hands don't work.So I built this.
YapToText turns your voice into finished text in any app on your Mac, and it does all of it on your Mac. Press one key, talk, and your words appear where your cursor is. Free, open source, built for accessibility first.
Free. No account, no subscription, nothing locked.
SEE IT WORK
The real interface, at real speed. Nothing sped up.
One key, then talk
Tap the Right Command key, say the sentence, tap again. The panel shows the words as they are recognized, thinks for a moment, and the finished text lands where your cursor was. The pop-up shows exactly what it heard as it hears it.
Intelligent insert
Put the cursor in the middle of a sentence and dictate. The app reads the words around the cursor first, so the case, the spacing, and the period come out right instead of leaving you to fix them.
Quick Edit
Select any text in any app, press one key, and say the change. Make it sound more formal. Fix the spelling. The rewritten text replaces the selection in one step, and one undo brings the original back.
DICTATION THAT BEHAVES LIKE DICTATION
Say it the way you would to any dictation system, and it lands the way you meant it.
A punctuation name at the end of a clause becomes the mark, with no stray period left behind. The same words in the middle of a sentence stay words.
Auto mode
Each dictation is read and formatted by itself. A letter with a greeting and a sign-off comes out as an email, a quick message stays as spoken, everything else gets a clean pass. It listens to the app you are in and to requests like make that formal.
Conservative by design
It fixes what the mic misheard and never rewrites your voice, drops a sentence, or adds words you did not say. Your wording, your tone, your profanity if that is how you talk.
Dictionaries and commands
Dictionaries shape what the app hears, not just what it types, and when you fix the same word twice it offers to remember it. Say insert phone number and get your real number; say smiley face and get the emoji.
Modes, on the fly
Auto, Raw Transcription, Clean Up, Note, Email, Message, and Code built in. Press 1 to 9 while dictating to pick one. Make your own with custom instructions and set a default per app.
IT HEARS YOU THROUGH ANYTHING
The speech model is only the last step. Most of the work happens before your voice ever reaches it, and after the words come back.
Whisper if you need to
A quiet voice is lifted relative to the room, not to a fixed level, so people who cannot project are heard. If your Mac's input volume is set low, the app says so and can raise it for you.
Noise, measured and removed
The room's noise floor is measured on every dictation and steady noise is subtracted only when the ratio calls for it, so clean audio is never touched and noisy audio is cleaned before recognition.
Decoding that adapts
Loud rooms switch the decoder to a deeper search. A loud word never clips. Long silences are compressed so the model does not drift, and a transcript that comes back shorter than what it heard gets a second pass.
Guards against nonsense
Repetition loops, invented speaker labels, and hallucinated pleasantries on silence are caught and removed. Cleanup can never delete a sentence or add words you did not say.
Every change to this pipeline is measured on a set of real dictations before it ships. Push-to-talk or toggle, pause and resume, cancel with Esc, silence auto-stop, and any key can be the trigger, down to a single bare key.
LIVES IN YOUR MENU BAR
One click to start, a mode picker, your input source, and your recent dictations, all from the menu bar. Regenerate any past dictation or selected text as a different mode. Transcribe any audio or video file.
The floating panel shows a real waveform of your voice: expanded or compact, your position, size, and colors, with the system's own glass, and it collapses into the wave when you finish instead of blinking out.
NOTHING LEAVES YOUR MAC
No analytics, no tracking, no accounts. The only network use is a model download you start yourself. Microphone is the one required permission. Accessibility lets the app type into other apps and read the text around your cursor; without it, your text goes to the clipboard. The source is public, so none of this has to be taken on faith. Read the privacy policy.
QUESTIONS
Is YapToText really free?
Yes. Every feature is available the moment you install it. There is no subscription, no account, and no paid tier. An optional tip jar exists for people who want to support the work.
Does my voice leave my Mac?
No. Speech recognition and cleanup run on your Mac. The app makes no network calls in normal use. The only network use is a model download you start yourself.
Which Macs does it run on?
A Mac with Apple silicon running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. A sentence is on screen well under a second after you stop talking.
How do I dictate punctuation?
Say it the way every dictation system expects: question mark, exclamation point, comma, new line, or dot dot dot, and the mark lands where you said it. Mention a punctuation name in the middle of a sentence and it stays a word. The full list.
Does it work with VoiceOver?
Yes. Every state is announced, the panel controls are accessibility actions, and the whole app can be driven from the keyboard or by voice alongside VoiceOver and Voice Control. More on accessibility.
Is it open source?
Yes. The complete source is public on GitHub under the GPL, so the privacy claims can be verified line by line.
MADE BY ONE PERSON WHO DICTATES FOR A LIVING
It is the way I write everything, including this page. Why I built a free, open-source dictation app.