TapTalk turns speech into text in any Mac app. Hold a key, talk, release, and the words are pasted where your cursor is. Runs 100 percent on-device on the Neural Engine, with an optional local AI rewrite. Free, open source, no account, no cloud.
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Hi Product Hunt, I'm Dhruv, and I built TapTalk.
I wanted dictation on my Mac that did not send my voice to someone's server, did not ask for a subscription, and worked inside every app I use, including the Electron ones. Nothing did all three at once, so I built it.
What it does: hold a key (Right Cmd by default), talk, let go. The transcript is pasted wherever your cursor is. That is the whole interface, plus a small pill at the bottom of the screen that tells you what is happening: red while it listens, white while it transcribes, green when it has pasted.
How it works: a Rust core captures the audio and trims silence with Silero VAD. NVIDIA Parakeet or Nemotron recognizes it on the Apple Neural Engine through Core ML. The audio is discarded after transcription and nothing is uploaded. Hold the Smart key instead and a local model (Qwen 2.5 via llama.cpp) cleans the transcript up to fit the app you are in: casual in Slack, a shell command in the terminal, clean prose in Notes. Speak Hindi and you can get Hinglish back. All of that runs on the Mac too.
Things you should know before you install:
- It is free and MIT licensed. No account, no telemetry, no trial.
- Any Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 14 or later. There is no Intel build.
- It is not notarized yet. Homebrew clears the Gatekeeper flag for you; for the DMG, right-click the app and choose Open the first time.
- Smart Mode uses a small model, and small models sometimes over-edit. It is off by default and every mode is a checkbox.
Install: brew install --cask vakharwalad23/tap/taptalk
I would like to know which app you dictate into most, and what breaks. Issues and pull requests are open at github.com/vakharwalad23/tap-talk.
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