On-device dictation for macOS
Type at the speed
of thought.
Hold a key, speak, release — clean text appears in any app. Runs entirely on your Mac, so your voice never leaves it. Free and open source.
Free · Apple Silicon · No account, no cloud
“so um i think we should ship on friday you know”
I think we should ship on Friday.
Three engines, one key
Apace picks the best engine
for every word.
Most apps bolt onto one model and hope. Apace ships three best-in-class on-device engines and routes automatically by your OS and language — or you pin the one you want.
Parakeet
NVIDIA's TDT model on the Neural Engine. ~2% word error rate, faster than realtime, English + 24 European languages.
Apple SpeechAnalyzer
Apple's native on-device transcriber. Auto-punctuated, zero model download, tuned for clean dictation.
WhisperKit
OpenAI Whisper on CoreML when you need the full breadth — 99 languages, any accent, any model size.
The honest comparison
Why not just use
built-in dictation?
Apple’s dictation is free and private — and that’s where it stops. Apace keeps the privacy and adds everything it’s missing.
Everything in the box
A full voice studio,
not a text box.
●Pro features / everything else ships free & open-source.
Per-app formatting
Casual in Slack, punctuated in Mail. Apace reads the app you're in and matches it.
Custom dictionary
Teach it your names, jargon, and product spellings once. It never gets them wrong again.
File transcription
Drop in audio or video, get clean text with timestamps. Export to SRT or VTT.
Streaming overlay
Watch the words land as you speak, with a floating preview that stays out of your way.
Voice-edit selected text
Highlight anything, hold the command key, and say “make this a list” or “fix the tone.”
It learns your voice
Apace quietly picks up the words and phrasing you use most — no dictionary editing required.
Voice-to-action
Wire commands to Shortcuts, AppleScript, and MCP tools. Run your Mac without touching it.
Smart modes
Define your own trigger phrases and prompts — a code mode, an email mode, a reply mode.
Don't trust us. Verify.
The privacy claim you can
actually check.
The whole transcription core is open-source. Every model runs on your Mac. Pull the plug on your wifi and Apace works exactly the same — because there was never anything on the other end of the wire.
$ nettop -p Apace
bytes_in 0
bytes_out 0
# dictating for 5 minutes…
bytes_out 0
Stop typing.
Start talking.
Free to download, open to inspect, yours to command. macOS on Apple Silicon.
Signed & notarized · no account · opens with zero warnings