Dictate

Hold control, speak, release: your words appear wherever you are typing.

Dictate is push-to-talk dictation for the Mac. It works in any app — mail, notes, chat, code editor, terminal — and turns what you say into clean, ready-to-send text.

What it does

• Push-to-talk on control (or fn, in Settings). Hold the key while you speak, release it when you are done. No window to open, no button to click. No waiting either: hold the key again while the last sentence is still being cleaned up and keep talking. Sentences land in the order you said them.
• Text lands at the cursor. The sentence is typed into whatever field has focus. If none does, it waits in the clipboard, ready to paste.
• Clean text, not a raw transcript. Hesitations ("euh", "um"), repetitions and false starts are removed, punctuation and capitals are fixed, misheard technical terms are corrected. Your words and meaning stay as you said them.
• Adapts to where you are. The tone of the cleanup follows the app: a bit more polished in a mail, direct in a chat, raw and technical in a code editor or a terminal.
• Private by design. Speech is transcribed on your Mac with Parakeet; the audio never leaves it. The cleanup is done by Claude Haiku 4.5 through your own Claude subscription (it answers without a thinking pass, in about a second) when Claude Code is installed and signed in, or else by Apple Intelligence's on-device model, so nothing leaves the Mac. No subscription? Paste an API key for Claude, OpenAI (GPT-5.4 nano, no reasoning) or Gemini (3.5 Flash-Lite): each runs its fastest model, and the key stays in the keychain. Until you pick, Dictate takes the first it finds: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, then Apple Intelligence. Pick another in Settings, or turn the cleanup off entirely. If Claude gets signed out, the pill says so and Apple Intelligence steps in; a reply that strays from what you said is dropped for the raw transcript. Crashes and errors are reported to Sentry without any of your text.
• Your language, your words. Pick the dictation language among 25 European languages and add your own vocabulary — names, jargon, product terms — so they come out spelled right. The app itself speaks English and French, following your Mac's language; the dictation language starts as your Mac's even when the interface falls back to English.
• Discreet. A small pill at the bottom of the screen shows that Dictate is listening, then working, and disappears. While you speak, a spinner beside the waves tells that earlier sentences are still on their way.
• Your numbers. A statistics window charts words, dictations, speaking pace and the delay before the text appears, by day, week or year. The delay chart comes first; when Apple Intelligence stood in for Claude during the period, it shows one model at a time, median included. Below it, the time you saved: what the same words would have taken to type at 40 words per minute, less the time spent speaking and waiting.

Get it

The website, dictate.polyforms.co, shows what a dictation looks like and links to the latest download.

Download the latest Dictate-<version>.dmg from Releases, open it, drag Dictate onto Applications and launch it. A short setup walks you through the permissions. Dictate then keeps itself up to date.

Or, with Homebrew:

brew install --cask moifort/tap/dictate

Requires macOS 27 on Apple Silicon.

License

Dictate is made by Polyforms and released under the MIT License.