Dictation that stays on your machine.

Why the Mac app processes everything locally

Most dictation tools record your audio and send it to a server to be transcribed. That is a reasonable engineering choice, and it comes with a consequence people rarely think about while they are dictating: everything you say into your keyboard replacement — client names, salary figures, medical notes, half-formed ideas you would never publish — travels to someone else's infrastructure and is retained under someone else's policy.

VibeType runs the speech model on your Mac instead. After the initial model download, transcription needs no internet connection at all, so you can dictate on a plane or on a locked-down network and get identical results. On the Mac, your dictation audio is never uploaded. The app does use the network for model downloads, licensing, purchases and software updates — that distinction is the whole point, so it is worth stating precisely rather than claiming the app is offline in some absolute sense.

What it actually does

Speech is messy. People pause, restart, contradict themselves and say “no, actually” halfway through a sentence. VibeType removes the filler and the false starts and inserts the sentence you meant, rather than a literal transcript you then have to edit.

• Works in any macOS app — mail clients, editors, browsers, terminals — without turning on system dictation.
• Supports over 100 languages, so you can dictate in the language you actually think in.
• Learns proper nouns and technical terms. Correct a name once and it is remembered for next time.
• Keeps transcript history and a custom vocabulary on-device.
• Touches the clipboard only to insert text — contents are saved before pasting and restored immediately after.

Requirements and availability

VibeType runs on Apple Silicon Macs on macOS 13 or later. The app is lightweight at rest; during active dictation it uses roughly 600 MB to 1.7 GB of memory depending on which processing mode you choose, because the model is resident on your machine rather than in a data centre. macOS is live today, with Windows, iPhone and Android planned. Builds are distributed as signed releases you can download here.

How it is priced

There is an annual plan and a one-time Lifetime licence. Lifetime exists because a tool you use hundreds of times a day should not become a permanent line item on a card, and because an app that does its work on your own hardware does not carry the per-word inference cost that forces a subscription. Regional pricing applies in India. Full details are on the pricing page.

Who to talk to

VibeType is a small, independently built product, which mostly means that when you report a bug it reaches someone who can fix it. Questions, licensing problems and feature requests all go to the same place — see the contact page. Longer notes on dictation workflows and how the product is built are on the blog.