Hold to Talk

Free, open-source, private voice dictation for macOS.

Requires macOS 15+, Apple Silicon

Get the latest release · brew install jxucoder/tap/holdtotalk

Why Hold to Talk

💸

No subscription, no paywall, no black box. You can inspect the code, build it yourself, and ship it your way.

🔒

Your speech stays on your Mac. Transcription runs locally on Apple Silicon via Core ML. No cloud upload, no account, no in-app tracking.

⚡

Uses high-performance on-device speech models through WhisperKit, with optional Apple Intelligence cleanup when available.

🌐

Dictate into Slack, Notes, your IDE, email, browser, and most text fields. Anywhere you can type, Hold to Talk can paste.

✨

When Apple Intelligence is available, Hold to Talk can clean up grammar and filler words entirely on-device with a customizable prompt.

📦

Download directly or install via Homebrew. Your workflow, your choice.

Press and hold your hotkey (Ctrl by default) to start recording

Say what you want to type — a floating indicator shows you're recording

Let go and your words are transcribed and pasted into the active app

Free software, Apache 2.0 licensed, and easy to inspect or build yourself.


      git clone https://github.com/jxucoder/hold-to-talk.git

      cd hold-to-talk

      make build && make run