Private, on-device dictation for Mac and iPhone
Say it loud. Keep it private.
Professional voice dictation, made easy.
On your device — private. No cloud, no uploads.
On Mac, hold a hotkey. On iPhone, hold the mic or use the Outspoken keyboard. Your voice becomes clean text locally, wherever you write.
macOS 14+ · Apple silicon · iPhone on iOS 17+ · no account
raw in · polished out
Fillers dropped. Grammar fixed. Meaning kept — by your local model.
01The flow
No app to open, no window to switch to. Outspoken lives behind a hotkey and types where your cursor already is.
Anywhere, in any app. A small overlay appears at the bottom of your screen.
Ums, false starts, mid-sentence pivots — say it the way you'd say it out loud.
whisper.cpp transcribes on-device. Your local model tidies grammar, punctuation, and formatting.
Polished text lands at your cursor in one atomic insert — and stays one ⌘V away as a fallback.
02Privacy model
There is no Outspoken cloud. Audio is captured and transcribed in-process. If you enable rewriting, the transcript goes to a model server on localhost — anything that isn't 127.0.0.1 is refused outright, redirects included, unless you explicitly approve your own server: one host, spelled out by you, off by default. The only other network access: Whisper model downloads you start yourself, checksum-verified, from huggingface.co. Every connection is listed in Settings → Network activity.
~/Library/Application Support/Outspoken/.03Every app
Outspoken types wherever your cursor is — native apps, Electron apps, browser text fields — and matches the register of the room: full sentences in email, loose in chat, a tidy comment in your editor.
Hi Priya — the revised SOW is attached, with the timeline moved up a week. Could you review section 3 before Friday?
shipping the fix now — should be live in ~10 min. will post in #incidents when it lands
Decision: consolidate both onboarding flows before the October release. Owner: Dana. Revisit at the next planning review.
// Debounce resize events so the chart doesn't re-render on every frame
Date picker resets to UTC when the browser locale is set to JST
coffee roasters near bernal heights open before 7am
On Mac, Outspoken types into the app in front of you. On iPhone, dictate in Outspoken or use its keyboard in Messages, Mail and wherever you write. Transcription stays on the device on both.
Dana
04Built-in local AI
Outspoken cleans up grammar, removes fillers, formats and restyles your words directly on your Mac — no Ollama, LM Studio or separate server setup required. The engine ships with the app; download a model once, then keep everything local. Already run your own AI? Connect that instead. Prefer verbatim? Switch rewriting off.
Transcription
Rewriting
Network
The local engine ships with Outspoken. Download the model you want once, then work offline.
Whisper model files (GGML) on your disk. Swap or delete them anytime — downloads happen in-app, SHA-256-verified.
Turn rewriting off for verbatim transcripts — quotes, minutes, legal.
05The details
Teach it “Kubernetes”, “Priya”, “PostgREST” once. Lives with your snippets in one local JSON file you can edit by hand — changes apply instantly.
Say “insert my address” and the whole block lands — sign-offs, links, canned replies. Snippet contents never reach the AI server.
“New paragraph.” “Bullet point.” “Question mark.” Structure and punctuation are spoken, not typed — in English and German.
Mail comes out professional, Slack stays casual, your editor gets a code comment — picked from the app in front. One toggle turns it off.
One toggle for verbatim output — every word as said, no model in between.
Speak Swiss German. Outspoken understands it and can keep the result in dialect — with local models and regional controls in Settings.
Dictate in German, English lands. Other target languages (French, Spanish, Italian, …) use your local AI model — all on this Mac.
When macOS flags secure input — password fields, login prompts — nothing is typed or pasted. Ever.
Text lands in one atomic insert — nothing dropped, nothing doubled. A clipboard rescue keeps every dictation one ⌘V away if an app refuses the insert.
06Choose your platform
The same private foundation, shaped for how each Apple platform works. Get the Mac beta today; the iPhone beta is already in TestFlight.
Outspoken 0.4.0 runs on macOS 14+ and Apple silicon. Hold a global hotkey and dictate into Mail, Slack, your editor or any browser field.
Outspoken-0.4.0.dmg · ~91 MB · no account
The iPhone app is already being tested through TestFlight. Dictate in Outspoken or use its keyboard across apps, with transcription and translation running on the device.
iOS 17+ · TestFlight beta · public release next
07Questions
Cloud dictation tools like Wispr Flow send your audio to their servers for transcription and cleanup. Outspoken does the same job — hotkey, polish, every app — with models that run on your machine. No audio, text, or context ever reaches us, because there's no “us” in the loop at all.
Yes, on Mac and iPhone. Transcription runs in-process on the device; optional models stay local once downloaded. Network access is limited to model downloads you start — and, on Mac, a server you explicitly choose to connect.
By default, on Outspoken's built-in local engine. If you choose your own endpoint instead, the transcript plus your style rules go exactly there. Snippet contents are swapped for placeholders before the request, so they never leave the app. Turn rewriting off and no request is made at all.
Speech-to-text runs on the whisper.cpp family, from tiny to large-v3 — including large-v3-turbo and a quantized q5 build. For rewriting, choose one of Outspoken's local models or connect any chat model behind an OpenAI-compatible API. Downloads happen in the app and are SHA-256-verified.
Yes. On Mac, speak German and English comes out; other target languages use your local AI model. On iPhone, local translation profiles and a live interpreter cover supported language pairs without sending the conversation to us.
Any Apple silicon Mac running macOS 14 or later. The default small model (~490 MB) decodes well over 30× realtime in our M-series measurements; lighter and larger models are one click away in Settings.
Yes — the iPhone app is currently in TestFlight on iOS 17 and later. Its public App Store release is coming soon; the macOS beta is available to download today.
Outspoken is focused on Mac and iPhone today. Windows and Linux remain on the roadmap.
Mac + iPhone
Outspoken for Mac is ready to download. Outspoken for iPhone is already in TestFlight and coming soon to the App Store.
macOS 14+ · Apple silicon · iOS 17+ · no account