Show HN: Yap – OSS on-device voice dictation for macOS with no model to download

Hey HN! I wanted to share this OSS project I've been working on.

It's called Yap and its a small menu-bar app for macOS that does voice to text for any input. You'll set a hotkey, press it, talk, press it again, and the text gets pasted into whatever field you were in. Everything runs locally and never leaves your computer. Fully OSS and MIT licensed.

With macOS 26, Apple recently added two new APIs, SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber, that do streaming on-device speech to text using models the OS ships and manages. So the app ships no model of its own and loads nothing before the first word. A recent benchmark put Apple's model slightly ahead of Whisper Small on accuracy and about 3x faster (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894752). On Mac, there's really no need anymore to download models or pay for expensive APIs.

A lot of existing dictation tools do one of a few things I wanted to avoid with this OSS project. They either:

- cost money (for something that's literally built into the OS)

- bundle memory-intensive models (e.g. Whisper or Parakeet)

- webapps wrapped in Electron

- Intel macs straight up don't work

- closed source

- use third-party APIs that will have access to all your transcripts

It's around 3,000 lines of native Swift in a 4 MB app and idles near 60 MB of memory. Audio comes off AVAudioEngine into SpeechAnalyzer with volatile results turned on for the live preview, history is stored in SwiftData. There's no network code in it at all.

Repo and a demo available here: https://github.com/FrigadeHQ/yap

Happy to answer questions and would love to hear any feature requests!

Show HN: Yap – OSS on-device voice dictation for macOS with no model to download
github.com

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.

My bad - this is now fixed. Thank you!

I don't think you're missing something - Apple's built in dictation is pretty good. The biggest issue is that it still executes parts of it online via Apple's servers and even has a disclosure that it "sends information like your voice input, contacts, and location to Apple."

This project uses the on-device SpeechAnalyzer API directly and makes zero network calls, and since it's open source you can verify that nothing leaves your Mac. It also keeps a local searchable history. Finally, I also added press-to-stop with a preview so you can cancel a bad take before it inserts, instead of typing live (very useful in terminal).

What type of package were you hoping it was?

Ahh that makes sense, I was under the impression that OS dictation used exclusively on device models for dictation now but you're right - they do still send this data for transcription.

That definitely changes my take and I'm interested in trying this!

My initial assumption was that this was something I could invoke via CLI or within scripts to transcribe audio from files or user input using on-device models, which is something I would presently probably use Whisper for.