Yap

Blazing-fast voice dictation for macOS that works anywhere you can type.

Press a shortcut, talk, press it again. Your words land in whatever text field you were using. No account, no API key, no audio leaving your machine.

Built by Frigade (opens in a new tab).

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9bd8dae6-49d6-4c06-98b9-878e24dd401f

What it does

Yap lives in your menu bar and waits for a shortcut. Trigger it and a small window appears near the bottom of the screen with a live waveform and a running preview of what you have said so far. Press the shortcut again and the text gets pasted into the app you were already working in. Every transcript is saved locally, so you can go back and copy something again later.

The default shortcut is ⌘⇧D. You can rebind it, or set a single modifier key instead. Tapping right shift on its own works nicely if you have a spare thumb.

Direct download

**Download Yap** (opens in a new tab) from the website, or grab the .dmg straight from Releases (opens in a new tab). Drag it into your Applications folder.

Yap runs on macOS 26 (Tahoe) on an Apple Silicon Mac. Intel Macs are not supported. Released builds are signed and notarized, so macOS opens them without complaint.

Why we built this

There's no shortage of voice to text tools for macOS, and some of the open source ones are genuinely good. Most of them still run into some mix of the same problems:

• Some cost money, which is a lot to ask for something that's now built into your OS for free.
• Most make you download a heavy model. Whisper weights run to hundreds of megabytes, sit in your RAM, and only feel fast on a recent, high end Mac. On slower machines a single paragraph can take thirty seconds to a minute to come back.
• A lot are Electron or web-stack apps, so a whole browser engine idles in your memory just to run a menu bar icon and a settings window.
• Plenty are bloated with settings and modes you will never open.
• Some are closed source, so you are trusting that your audio and transcripts stay on your machine, with no way to check.

What changed recently is macOS 26. It added two APIs, SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber, that do on-device streaming speech to text using models the OS ships and manages. The app carries no model of its own, loads nothing into memory before the first word, and needs no API key or per minute cost. Text comes back as you talk.