Dictabar

Dictabar is a native menu-bar voice typing app for Apple silicon Macs. Press a global shortcut, speak, and your words are inserted directly into any app that accepts text.

I built Dictabar because most voice typing apps lock users into one transcription engine, offer only a small selection of providers, or require a recurring subscription. Alternatives such as Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, VoiceInk, MacWhisper, Spokenly, and Apple Dictation each take a more limited approach to model and provider choice.

Dictabar gives you significantly more flexibility. You can run speech recognition locally on your Mac or connect directly to more than 25 cloud and self-hosted providers using your own API keys. This lets you choose the best model for your language, accuracy, latency, privacy requirements, and budget, without switching to another dictation app whenever a better speech model appears.

Dictabar supports multiple languages, configurable hold-to-talk and toggle shortcuts, paste or simulated typing, microphone selection, optional local transcript history, and secure automatic updates. Your audio is never routed through Dictabar servers. The app has no accounts, analytics, ads, subscriptions, or hosted speech proxy.

Dictabar is free and open source under the GPL-3.0-only license.