Free, open-source voice dictation for macOS. Hold a key, talk, release — polished text lands in whatever app you're in. Your audio never leaves your Mac.
People speak at roughly 150 words a minute and type at roughly 40. OpenVoiceFlow exists because closing that gap shouldn't cost $144 a year or require streaming your voice to someone's cloud. We think voice input should eventually be a default feature of every operating system; until it is, this is our contribution — and contributions are welcome.
Download the DMG — one universal build for Apple Silicon and Intel, Developer-ID signed and Apple-notarized. Drag it to Applications, open it, and a one-minute setup walks you through permissions and a speech-engine choice.
Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer. On macOS 12–13, the download page offers a retained legacy build.
- Push-to-talk dictation — hold your chosen key (default:
fn), speak, release. Text pastes at your cursor in any app. - On-device transcription — WhisperKit runs Whisper locally, from
tiny(39 MB) tolarge-v3-turbo. Audio is processed in memory and discarded; nothing is uploaded, nothing is recorded when the key isn't held. - Live feedback — your words appear in the HUD as you speak, so you know it hears you.
- Optional AI cleanup — off by default (raw transcript, fully local). Turn it on to polish grammar and filler words via OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, or a fully-local Ollama model. Keys live in the macOS Keychain. Only cleaned text ever touches an API — never audio.
- Personal dictionary, snippets, per-app styles — teach it names and jargon once; spoken shortcuts expand to full text; casual in Slack, formal in Mail.
- Auto-updates — signed Sparkle updates from openvoiceflow.com, verified with an EdDSA key pinned in the app.
No account. No telemetry. No paid tier — see the mission.
You need a Mac on macOS 14+ with Xcode 16.4+ and XcodeGen (brew install xcodegen).
git clone https://github.com/shimoverse/openvoiceflow.git
cd openvoiceflow
bash native/scripts/run-local.shThat generates the Xcode project from native/project.yml, builds an ad-hoc-signed debug app, and launches it. (Ad-hoc rather than unsigned, because macOS ties the Accessibility and Input Monitoring grants to a code signature — unsigned, the hotkey silently never fires.) For the signed + notarized release pipeline, see native/BUILD_RUNBOOK.md.
Everything shipping lives in native/Sources/OpenVoiceFlow/ — a small Swift/SwiftUI app with no storyboard and no dependencies beyond WhisperKit and Sparkle:
| Piece | File | Job |
|---|---|---|
| App + menu bar | OpenVoiceFlowApp.swift |
MenuBarExtra, login item, Dock policy |
| State machine | AppController.swift |
idle → recording → transcribing → cleaning → pasting |
| Hotkey | HotkeyEngine.swift |
CGEvent tap; one key watched, everything else passes through |
| Audio | AudioCapture.swift |
16 kHz mono capture, level metering |
| Transcription | Transcriber.swift |
WhisperKit lifecycle, model download, live partials |
| Cleanup | CleanupProvider.swift |
the five backends behind one protocol |
| Paste | Paster.swift |
⌘V synthesis with clipboard restore |
| HUD | HUDController.swift |
the floating waveform pill |
| Dashboard | DashboardView.swift |
history, stats, dictionary, snippets, styles, settings |
| Onboarding | OnboardingView.swift |
permissions, engine choice, first dictation |
The repo also contains the legacy Python app (voiceflow/, ≤ 0.3.6) that the native app replaced. It is end-of-life, receives no security fixes, and its defaults differ from current policy — kept only for reference and for the macOS 12–13 fallback build. Don't start there.
Start with CONTRIBUTING.md. The short version: pull requests are welcome, CI compiles the Swift app and runs the website tests on every PR, and the maintainer reviews everything. Good first contributions: try the app and file honest bug reports, add an XCTest target (we want one), improve accuracy for your language.
The one-page version: audio on-device always; text to a cloud only if you enable cleanup; keys in the Keychain; no telemetry. Full statements: PRIVACY.md · SECURITY.md · threat model. To report a vulnerability, see SECURITY.md.
MIT © Shimoverse Studios and contributors — free for any use, forever; the copyright notice must travel with every copy. If you use or build on OpenVoiceFlow, credit the project visibly — and email shimoverse@gmail.com to tell us about it. The name and logo are governed separately by the brand policy: derivatives must rebrand and credit the original. Third-party notices: docs/legal/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.