Yap - Blazing-fast on-device voice dictation for macOS
Show HN: Yap – OSS on-device voice dictation for macOS with no model to download
Yap is a free, open-source voice dictation tool for macOS that leverages Apple's native Speech framework for instant, on-device transcription. Unlike competitors requiring heavy model downloads or API keys, Yap operates entirely offline with zero network calls, ensuring complete privacy. Weighing only 4 MB, it features a global shortcut to paste dictated text directly into any active application. Built with Swift, it offers live waveform previews and local transcript history, making it the ultimate lightweight solution for developers and writers who need to speak faster than they can type.
Yap ships no model at all. It's roughly three thousand lines of native Swift in a 4 MB app, all of it open, with no browser engine anywhere in sight. It idles around 60 MB of memory and never touches the network.
- heresalexandria
I don't think get it unless I'm missing something - how is this different from just using the built in Mac OS dictation feature?
At first I thought it was going to be a CLI/package to interface with that API which sounded interesting, but I already use a hotkey to dictate text on my Mac via the OS.
- jwr
Incidentally, I've been testing a lot of dictation apps and models. I am on macOS Sequoia and intend to skip Tahoe altogether, so newer Apple models were not an option. I also dictate in multiple languages.
I mostly use the MacWhisper app until now, but I got frustrated by its slow development and lack of focus and dictation. So I tried the free TypeWhisper app. It works very well, but then I tested multiple models and my conclusion was that one cannot beat the Whisper Large v3 model for accuracy. I tried Qwen ASR (very good, but only for English), Voxtral (spoke Polish to it and it wrote Russian, BIG oopsie), Parakeet TDT 3 (very fast, but sometimes inaccurate).
I got frustrated by the speed of the Whisper Large model. So I spent an hour with AI benchmarking, testing and developing a new plugin. Turns out that on a modern Mac with a good GPU you can run the Whisper Large model at roughly the same speed as the tiny Parakeet model. 2-3x faster than what other apps ship. It's just that nobody bothered.
So, I am now happily dictating into TypeWhisper and then feeding the dictated text into a local gemma-4-26b-a4b-qat LLM for corrections. Everything happens instantly.
- 9dev
Amazing! This is something I wanted to look into too.
The Apple Foundation models SDKs are surprisingly cool. I recently started working on a personal productivity app that tries to keep track of all the projects I work on, and the ideas and initiatives within these. It does so by creating a graph of events, fed by Claude transcripts and the git and browser history, then letting FM summarize and describe all events; that in turn feeds a semantic search index in an SQLite database.
What I have now is an app that shows me where all my projects stand, what I last worked on, where I left forks behind (like deciding for one idea and doing something else "later"), and how to get back into something I wasn’t working on for a while. It also has a built-in MCP server, so I can ask Claude code about any past event or decision or roughly-similar keyword, and it’ll get sensible answers back!
Called the thing Pensieve :-)
However, one thing still missing is actually being able to ask it directly, or talk to it, so Yap looks like a great opportunity to learn!
- Ducki
Does the built-in dictation not use these models or why would I use this app instead of Apple's own dictation?
- prabhanjana_c
Great, just experimenting to see which is better voice apps to use for my Claude Code cli, on my Mac. for now settled with /voice command. will try Yap. It will be good to have an option to add custom voice commands, let say I want to open an app, or go to folder, that can be plugged, apart from transcription. Not sure if that is deviation, for Yap, love to have that kind of feature.