Steno

Steno types what you say into the field that has focus. Hold Option, or another key you choose, speak, and release; the text is pasted at the cursor. Transcription runs on the Mac with Whisper through whisper.cpp, and audio is never written to disk. Steno also transcribes meetings with timestamps, keeps a searchable history, and offers a personal dictionary that corrects names. It suits people who write a lot, or who cannot send their voice to a cloud service.

It requires an Apple silicon Mac with macOS 14.2 or later and at least 2.5 GB of free space, about 4 GB with the largest model. The DMG is not notarized, so macOS blocks the first launch; allow it under System Settings › Privacy & Security. Setup asks for microphone access and Accessibility permission, which Steno uses to detect the hotkey and paste the text. The only network request is the one-time model download from Hugging Face.