Plainsay

Plainsay is a small native dictation app for Apple silicon Macs. Hold a key (Right Command by default), speak, release, and the text is pasted where your cursor is. Speech recognition runs locally with Whisper large-v3-turbo (via WhisperKit) or NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 (via FluidAudio) on Core ML, and works offline after a one-time model download.

Local mode is free, needs no account and sends no telemetry. The app is a 12 MB signed and notarized download. The client is MIT-licensed, and the repository includes a reproducible benchmark harness with committed LibriSpeech clips and raw per-clip results.

Features:

• Pastes back into the window you started dictating in; if it can't confirm that window, the text stays on the clipboard instead of landing somewhere else
• Works in native apps, Electron apps, web views and terminals
• Voice Edit: say "change Tuesday to Thursday" to correct the last dictation, or select text and ask for an edit with a before/after comparison
• Optional Polishing (transcript cleanup): off, your own API key, or a compatible local endpoint
• Custom vocabulary, local history you can limit or turn off
• Expected digests for every supported model ship in the signed app; downloaded model files that don't match are refused

Optional Plainsay Cloud (US$4/month) provides hosted transcription and Polishing and sends audio to the service; the README documents exactly what leaves the Mac in each mode.

Requires macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon. Plainsay only dictates: it has no file transcription.

Disclosure: added by the developer.