Utter

Voice dictation for the Mac that never leaves the Mac.

Hold a key, say it, let go. Your words appear wherever the cursor is.
The speech model runs on your Mac, so it works offline, with no account and no subscription.

 

_{macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon and Intel · 192 MB, speech model included · All releases · Official Website}

🎬 Watch the Utter promo video (16:9 Landscape)

1. Hold fn in any app: Mail, Slack, Notes, Xcode, a terminal, a browser.
2. Talk. The pill at the bottom of the screen turns red and shows it's listening.
3. Let go. Utter turns your speech into text on your Mac and types it at the cursor.

Double-tap fn to keep listening hands-free, and press Esc to cancel.

At rest the pill is a 32 by 6 point stripe. It only grows while you talk.

If no text box was selected when you finished, your words wait in the island, so nothing you said is lost. Copy them, or save them as a note.

Utter was built to keep your voice on your Mac. This is how the code behaves out of the box:

Read PRIVACY.md for the details.

Click the Utter icon in the menu bar to see today's tracks, newest first. ↩ types a track again into the app you were just in. ⌘C copies it, and ⌘O opens it in the Library. Search looks through every day, note and meeting. Start hands-free, a new note or a meeting recording from the keys underneath. The red stripe across the top fills up as you talk toward your daily word goal.

Each day is a tape. Morning tracks go on Side A and the afternoon and evening on Side B, each with its running time. Pick a track and it opens on the right, where you can paste it again, copy it, turn it into a note or delete it. Deleting can be undone.

Dictate straight into a note with ⌃⌥N. When a Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, Webex, Slack or Discord call starts, Utter can offer to transcribe it. It records your microphone and the call audio and labels the two sides You and Others, all on your Mac.

• Dictionary: names and terms Utter should always spell your way, such as colleagues, products and jargon. When Utter hears a new name, it offers to add it.
• Snippets: say a short phrase and it expands into longer text, with [date], [time], [day] and [clipboard] filled in when it expands.
• Voice commands: select text in any app and say what to do with it ("make this shorter", "fix the punctuation"). On Macs with Apple Intelligence these run on the on-device model.

An optional robot that floats near the pill, listens along with you, and sleeps when you're idle. It can remind you to stretch, drink water or take a break, and keep private reminders you speak with ⌃⌥R. It goes quiet by itself while you share your screen or record a meeting. Turn it on in Settings → Companion.

In Settings → Speech you can switch engines, or download larger Whisper models, including multilingual ones.

Utter is a native Swift app, designed like a cassette J-card: white ruled card, navy ink, and a red stripe for today's tape. In Dark mode it becomes chrome tape. It lives in the menu bar and stays out of the Dock unless you ask for it there.

Anywhere

You can change the dictation key in Settings → Shortcuts.

In the menu-bar hub

In the Library

1. Download Utter-1.2.0.dmg and open it.
2. Drag Utter into Applications.
3. Open Utter. Setup asks for two permissions:
   • Microphone, to hear you.
   • Accessibility, to notice the fn key and type into other apps.

You need macOS 26 with Xcode 26 or its Command Line Tools, because the app uses the macOS 26 SDK. The app itself runs on macOS 14 and later.

git clone https://github.com/h3x-levi/Utter.git
cd Utter
swift build                                  # compile
swift test                                   # run the test suite
bash scripts/build-app.sh --no-dmg           # make build/Utter.app
bash scripts/build-app.sh --version=1.2.0    # make build/Utter-1.2.0.dmg too

To try a build without touching your own notes and history, point it at a throwaway folder:

open --env UTTER_DATA_DIR=/tmp/utter-dev build/Utter.app --args --open-window

Utter is a community project and contributions are welcome, whether code, design, bug reports or docs.

• Found a bug? Open an issue. Include your macOS version, Mac model and microphone. Settings → General → Report an Issue fills most of this in for you.
• Want to build something? Open an issue first for anything large so we can agree on the shape, then send a pull request.
• Before you start, read CONTRIBUTING.md. Above all, never log or upload audio, transcripts or anything the user typed.

How the code is laid out:

• whisper.cpp (MIT) for the Accurate engine.
• Whistle by Cactus Compute (Apache 2.0) for the Fast engine.
• The companion robot is a native port of a design by CX-ArtLab (MIT).

Full notices are in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.