Free, local, push-to-talk dictation for macOS. Hold a hotkey, speak, release, and your audio never leaves your Mac.
Category: Desktop App
Tech Stack: Tauri 2, Rust, React, TypeScript, whisper.cpp, Apple Metal
Yapdesk is a free, local-only, push-to-talk dictation app for macOS. Hold the hotkey, speak, release, and the transcribed text is dropped wherever your cursor is. Audio never leaves the machine. Transcription runs on whisper.cpp accelerated by Apple Metal.
Yapdesk is my first desktop app, and I built it for a very simple reason: I knew I could replicate the existing dictation tools (all of them cloud-based, all of them charging a monthly fee) without sending my voice to someone else's server and without paying a recurring bill for something my machine could already do. So I built it for myself first, then open-sourced it on GitHub for anyone else who felt the same way.
From there it generalized: dictation should be instant, private, and free. Most options are at least one of cloud-based, paid, or slow. Yapdesk is none of those. It's a 60MB native app that runs whisper locally on Apple Silicon and types fast enough that it feels like part of the OS.