A tiny menu-bar voice dictation app for macOS. Free.
Hold a key, speak, release — the recognised text is typed wherever your cursor is. It lives in the menu bar: no Dock icon, no main window, no account. You bring your own API key, and the audio goes straight to the recognition service — there is no server of ours in between.
Get VerbaLite.zip from the latest release,
unzip it, and drag VerbaLite.app into /Applications.
The build is ad-hoc signed — there is no Apple Developer certificate behind it, so Gatekeeper will not open it on a double-click. To run it the first time:
right-click the app → Open → Open
macOS remembers the choice, so this is a one-time step.
- Hold-to-talk on a key of your choosing
- Speech recognition via Groq Whisper (
whisper-large-v3-turbo) - Optional cleanup pass that fixes punctuation and obvious slips
- Automatic language detection — dozens of languages out of the box
- Universal binary: Apple Silicon and Intel
VerbaLite has no servers. Audio and text leave your Mac only for the endpoint you configure yourself. Your API key is stored in the macOS keychain. No telemetry, no analytics, no accounts.
macOS 13 or later, and a free Groq API key from console.groq.com.
VerbaLite is the small free one. Verba is the full version — cleanup levels, dictation history, snippets, a learning vocabulary, six interface languages and automatic updates.
Made with care by Anton Karpov · karpovanton.me