WhisperWoof: voice dictation for Mac that types as you speak
WhisperWoof listens on your Mac and types while you speak — Chinese, English, or both in one sentence. Let go of the key and it tidies the words up and pastes them where your cursor is.
Free and open source. Nothing you say leaves your computer.
See it as you say it, or all at once
Pick how dictation behaves in Settings. Both run on your Mac; the difference is when the words show up.
Live typing
Words appear while you talk, like a phone keyboard's voice input. Words in glass may still change as it hears more.
When you let go, the whole recording is checked again, cleaned up and pasted.
After you finish
Mando shows a waveform while you speak, then transcribes everything in one pass. The lightest on your Mac.
Best when you dictate long passages and only need the final text.
Speak the way you actually talk
Switch languages mid-sentence, trail off, correct yourself. The cleanup keeps your words and your language, drops the filler, and adds the punctuation.
The key you press decides where it goes
No commands to remember and no guessing: each combination has one destination.
Hold to talk, let go to paste
Text lands at your cursor in whatever app you're in. Double-tap fn to keep recording hands-free, then tap once to finish.
Copy instead of paste
For when you want to put the text somewhere yourself.
Save a note
Thoughts go straight into a Markdown file, dated and searchable.
File it under a project
Keep voice notes grouped with the work they belong to.
Everything you copy, kept
WhisperWoof keeps what you copy, text on one side and images on the other. Click anything to put it back on your clipboard: a screenshot pastes as the picture, not as its file name.
Copy it back
Images paste as images. Photos copied in Finder are kept as the photos, HEIC included.
Save it to Notes
Any item becomes a note. Images go into the note's attachments, so Obsidian shows them too.
Keep what you want
Pin what matters. Keep history forever or for 90, 30 or 7 days, and cap how much space images use.
Passwords stay out
Whatever 1Password or another password manager copies is never saved.
How it works
Every dictation takes the same short trip. Your own words (names, jargon, product names) can join it in three places, and Memory learns them from the fixes you already make.
Before it listens
Whisper reads your words first, like notes before a call, so “super base” comes out as Supabase.
Right after
Fix the same mishearing twice and Memory offers to fix it for you from then on, with every engine, even the ones that can't take hints. It only swaps what you approve.
The last pass
The on-device language model sees your Dictionary while it tidies punctuation and filler words.
Read the full guideHow the speech models differ, the 224-token window, and a Memory playground to try.
Follow one sentence through
“Please deploy the dashboard to Supabase and ping Kubernetes on Vercel.”
Real transcripts from the local engines, on synthetic speech.
Everything happens on your Mac
WhisperWoof ships its own speech and language models and runs them on your laptop. No account, no upload, no subscription. Cloud models are there if you bring your own key — off unless you turn them on.
Lock it with Touch ID
Turn on encryption and everything WhisperWoof keeps about you is stored encrypted on your Mac: your history (search still works), notes, recordings, clipboard images and Memory. It stays off until you turn it on in Settings.
WhisperWoof is locked
Dictation still works. New entries are saved sealed until you unlock.
Touch ID holds the key
The key sits in your Mac's Secure Enclave, so it can't be read without your finger, even by someone who knows your Mac password. A password works too.
Twelve words open it anywhere
A recovery phrase opens your data on any Mac. There is no back door: lose both the password and the phrase and the data is gone, and setup says so before you start.
It keeps listening while locked
WhisperWoof locks when your Mac locks or sleeps. Whatever you dictate meanwhile is sealed right away and joins your history when you unlock.
Want your notes as plain Markdown for Obsidian or iCloud? Keep them readable and encrypt everything else.
Give Mando your voice
Free and open source, built for Apple Silicon Macs.
Needs macOS on Apple Silicon, a microphone, and about 3 GB for the models.
Quickest install: paste curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/h3qing/WhisperWoof/main/scripts/install.sh | bash into Terminal. Using the .dmg instead? The app isn't signed by Apple yet: the first time you open it, click Done, then choose Open Anyway in System Settings → Privacy & Security.