Local dictation for macOS
Airtype sits quietly in your menu bar. Hold the Fn key and say what you’re thinking, ums and backtracks and all. The tidy version lands right where you were typing. It is completely private: Whisper and a small language model do the work on your own Mac, so your voice never leaves the room. No cloud, no account, nothing standing between you and your first sentence.
Start typing…
Let’s do Wednesday. That works better for the review, and I’ll bring the numbers.
You said: “um so let’s do monday, no wait, wednesday works better for the review and I’ll bring the numbers”
One key, no window to open, and a result you do not have to go back and fix.
Mail, Slack, a terminal, a text box in a browser. Airtype delivers into the app in front of you rather than asking you to copy from somewhere else. If nothing editable has focus, it goes to the clipboard instead of vanishing.
Whisper listens and a small Qwen model tidies up, both living entirely on your Mac. The recording is gone the moment it’s transcribed. No server, no telemetry, no account. Your words stay yours, not because we promise, but because there’s nowhere else for them to go.
“Let’s do Monday, no wait, Wednesday” arrives as “Let’s do Wednesday.” Fillers go. Spoken lists become bullets. Punctuation you never said appears where it belongs, and the questions you actually asked stay questions.
Verbatim in Terminal and Xcode, because punctuation you did not say is a bug in a shell. Casual in Slack and Messages. Fuller sentences in Mail. Set it per app if our guesses are wrong for how you work.
Your friends’ names, your team’s jargon, that one word it keeps getting wrong. Airtype notices the corrections you make right after it types and quietly stops repeating the mistake. The list it keeps is yours to see and edit. No black box.
Say “insert my address” and your address arrives. Say your sign-off and it signs off. Anything sensitive is kept in the macOS Keychain rather than a settings file.
Nothing in front of you? Say it anyway.
Airtype keeps every dictation, whether it landed in an app or not. Hold Fn on an empty desktop, say the thing you will have forgotten by lunchtime, and it goes two places at once: the clipboard, ready to paste wherever you end up, and Airtype’s own history, where it stays searchable. Re-insert it later, run the clean-up over it again, or just edit it. The recording is the only thing thrown away.
Then you’ll mostly forget it’s there, which is the idea.
Open the disk image, drag Airtype to Applications. It is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning. It lives in the menu bar, not the Dock.
Setup asks for Microphone, Input Monitoring and Accessibility one at a time, and explains what each is for before asking. Nothing is requested at launch.
Hold the Fn key, say something, let go. Quick-tap it instead to go hands-free until you tap again. Esc cancels. A pill at the bottom of the screen shows the level and the time.
Running the models on your own machine is the whole point, and it is also the cost. Here is all of it, up front.
No. Transcription and clean-up both run as local processes on your Mac. Airtype makes exactly one kind of outbound request in its whole life: downloading the models from Hugging Face during setup. After that it talks to nothing but itself. There is no telemetry, no crash reporting and no account.
A very small team that got tired of watching good sentences die somewhere between brain and keyboard. We use Airtype all day ourselves, so every awkward bit left in this version is one we hit first. If something feels off, or delightfully right, write to hello@amannigam.in. A person reads it, usually the same day.
Each one buys a specific thing. Microphone to record. Input Monitoring to notice that you are holding the Fn key, which no app can see without it. Accessibility to put the text into the app you are actually using, and to swallow the keypress so Fn stops opening the emoji picker. Deny any of them and Airtype tells you exactly what stopped working rather than failing quietly.
The App Store requires the App Sandbox, and a sandboxed app is not allowed to watch a global key or type into another application. That is the entire product, so this is a technical wall rather than a choice. The DMG is signed and notarized by Apple instead, which is the same check the App Store runs.
No. There is no trial, no licence key and nothing to enter. Airtype costs nothing to run: the models are on your machine, not on a server someone has to pay for. If it saves you real time, there is a quiet way to chip in from inside the app. No pressure. Telling a friend counts just as much.
Both are on the way. Airtype starts on Apple Silicon because that is where a local model can transcribe faster than you can finish the sentence, but the same idea belongs everywhere you type. Windows is planned, and an iPhone keyboard is already being designed around what iOS actually allows. Intel Macs are the one thing not on the list. The models lean on Metal and the Neural Engine, and without them dictation stops feeling instant.
Whisper large-v3-turbo for speech, under the MIT licence, and Qwen3-4B-Instruct for clean-up, under Apache-2.0. Both are permissive, which matters because Airtype downloads them on your behalf and the licence travels with them. A well-scoring alternative was deliberately left out for shipping under a research-only licence.