Hold
Keep a key down. Fn, Right Option, whichever you pick. It never types a stray character.
Free & open source · macOS
Speak.
It’s typed.
VoiceYak is push-to-talk voice to text for your Mac. Hold a key, say what you’re thinking, and release. It’s pasted wherever your cursor is. The AI dictation runs on your machine, so nothing you say ever leaves it.
Free forever · Apple Silicon · macOS 26.2+
Hold the key below. Watch this line.
0:00
Transcribing
Click and hold the key, or hold space.
0:00 → 0:03
From held key
to pasted text.
Speak
The pill listens while you talk. Say a sentence or dictate for minutes. It keeps up.
Release
Let go. Transcribed on-device, pasted right where you were typing. In any app.
On-device AI
A frontier model,
living on your Mac.
NVIDIA’s Parakeet TDT, the same family that tops open speech leaderboards, quantized to int8 and running locally on Apple Silicon. Accuracy you’d expect from the cloud, latency you wouldn’t.
Custom dictionary
It learns
your words.
Product names, jargon, the way you actually talk. Fix a misheard term once and VoiceYak gets it right from then on. Your dictionary is yours, stored on disk, editable any time.
Quiet by design
A menu bar app,
not a fleet of windows.
VoiceYak lives in your menu bar and stays out of the way. A dashboard when you want it, a floating pill while you speak, and nothing at all the rest of the time.
Privacy
Nothing leaves
this machine.
No cloud transcription. No account. No telemetry. The only network requests VoiceYak ever makes are a one-time model download and a release check you explicitly opt into. Don’t take our word for it: the source is public.
No cloud
No account
No telemetry
No subscription
MIT licensed
42 seconds
Watch it work.
- Requires
- macOS 26.2+, Apple Silicon
- Model
- NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B, int8 (~460 MB)
- Engine
- sherpa-onnx speech to text, fully offline
- Languages
- English, or the 25-language multilingual model
- License
- MIT, free forever
- Install
- Drag-and-drop DMG, ~2 minutes to first dictation