Edit by talking
Select text, hold the command key, and say what you want. "Make this shorter." "Turn this into bullets." With nothing selected, it writes at the cursor.
Free and open source, for Apple Silicon Macs
Speak anywhere
you can type.
Hold Right Option, talk, let go. LocalFlow transcribes on your Mac and pastes the text where your cursor is. It works with Wi‑Fi off.
macOS 14 or later · Apple Silicon · MIT license
Hold to talk. Press and hold the key, or your real Right Option. Let go to paste. esc cancels.
Privacy
Here's everything that leaves your Mac.
The list is short on purpose. Speech recognition runs on the Neural Engine through Core ML, so there's no server to send anything to.
- Your voiceStaysHeld in memory while it's transcribed. Nothing is written to disk unless you turn on diagnostic recordings.
- Your wordsStaysPasted where you're typing, and logged to a Markdown file per day on your Mac. You can switch the log off.
- Account, analyticsNoneThere's nothing to sign in to and no telemetry.
- Speech modelOnceDownloaded on first launch and cached. After that, dictation works offline.
- Update checkDailySigned updates through Sparkle. You can turn it off in Settings.
Listening themes
Pick how listening looks.
The app ships with 17 HUD themes. Five of them are running below. Pick one and the demo above switches to it.
Details
The small stuff, handled.
Formatting by voice
Say "first... second..." and you get a numbered list. Long pauses start new paragraphs on their own.
Fix it once
Correct a misheard word and LocalFlow applies the fix from then on, and listens for it next time.
Snippets
Say a trigger phrase anywhere in a dictation and it's swapped for your saved text.
Matches the app
With cleanup on, text is casual in Messages, proper in Mail, and hands off your camelCase in editors.
Your clipboard survives
LocalFlow pastes, then puts back whatever you had copied. Password fields get typed keystrokes instead.
Changed your mind?
Press Escape while you're talking, or while it's still transcribing, and nothing gets pasted.
Speech engines
Two models. Both run on your Mac.
Default
Whisper Large v3 Turbo
The most accurate option. It also takes your custom vocabulary, so names and jargon come out right.
Fastest
Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3
Live text updates about once a second while you talk. No custom vocabulary.
Want cleanup that strips "um" and fixes false starts? Turn it on and it runs on Apple Intelligence (macOS 26), or on a small local model through Ollama.
Give your keyboard a break.
- Mac
- Apple Silicon (M1 or later)
- macOS
- 14 Sonoma or later
- Disk
- About 2 GB for the model
- Language
- English
- Permissions
- Microphone, Accessibility
- Price
- Free, MIT licensed