FluidVoice

Dictation on a Mac usually means sending your voice to somebody else's server. FluidVoice works the other way round, an open source voice-to-text app for macOS where your voice and the text it produces stay on the machine unless you deliberately opt in to a cloud AI provider.

Speech recognition is model agnostic. You choose between Nemotron Speech 3.5, Parakeet Flash, Parakeet TDT v3 and v2, Cohere Transcribe, Apple Speech and Whisper, depending on the language you speak and the latency you can accept. Cleanup, capitalization and formatting are handled either by Fluid Intelligence, a separate local runtime kept private by the authors, or by OpenAI, Groq and custom providers.

Dictation reaches the whole desktop rather than a single window.

• Command Mode: launch apps, run shortcuts and trigger system actions by voice.
• Write Mode: dictate new text or rewrite a selection inside any text field.
• Live preview: a transcription overlay shows words as you speak, fitted around the MacBook notch where there is one.
• Per-app prompts: different prompt sets can be assigned to different applications, so wording adapts to whatever you are working in.
• Audio history: optional local recording history with budget controls and ZIP export, kept off cloud storage.

Installation is a Homebrew cask or a direct download of the latest release. A global hotkey captures audio from anywhere, insertion goes through the accessibility APIs so it works app by app, and auto-updates carry an optional beta channel. The app is GPLv3, with iOS and Windows versions announced as on the way.