Types straight into the tools you already live in
You think in full sentences and type in fragments. Hold ⌥Space, say the thing, and clean text lands at your cursor: the agent brief, the commit message, the PR reply. All of it on your Mac, none of it in a cloud.
Press and hold the pill, then let go. That is the whole app.
Types straight into the tools you already live in
It's not one big slowdown. It's a hundred small ones: reaching for the keyboard to brief an agent, typing a commit message after you've already said it out loud in your head, breaking your train of thought to phrase a PR reply that took longer to type than the fix took to write.
The commonly cited cost of a context switch. Every keyboard-bound detour, briefing an agent, writing a ticket, is a chance to pay it again.
Your best explanation of a bug, typed, arrives at roughly a quarter of the speed you thought it. The agent waits on your hands, not your head.
Even a mediocre explanation, spoken, outruns your best typed one. Voice isn't a shortcut. It's the actual speed of your thinking.
The bottleneck was never your judgment, your architecture sense, or how well you can brief a model. It was always the twenty seconds it takes to type what you already knew to say.
Remove the bottleneckSame standup, same bug, same agent, same reviewer. The only variable is whether your thoughts travel through your fingers or your voice.
Nothing failed. You just paid a typing tax on every thought, and rounded half of them down to fit.
Same work, same judgment. The difference is every thought shipped at full size, at the speed you had it.
OpenWhisper isn't another window to manage. It's a hold-to-talk layer under everything you already use, from Terminal to Xcode to your ticket tracker.
Cursor in Terminal, a PR comment box, Xcode, a Linear ticket, a Slack thread. Hold ⌥Space and start talking. No app switch, no click into a text box first.
Core ML runs Whisper on the Apple Neural Engine in real time. Your voice never becomes a network request.
Capitalization, punctuation, spoken commands like “new line” or “delete that,” and a dictionary that already knows your symbol names and jargon.
Release the key. Clean text is already typed where you were about to type it yourself, just faster and with your hands free for the next thing.
Say you narrate about 2,000 words of prose a day: agent briefs, commits, reviews, tickets, Slack. At 40 wpm that's 50 minutes of typing. At 150 wpm it's about 13 minutes of talking. Here's what the difference looks like when it stops leaking.
50 minutes of typing becomes ~13 minutes of speaking. The rest is yours again.
Roughly three focused hours. That's a feature, a refactor, or leaving on time.
Nearly four working weeks of hands-on-keyboard time, reclaimed from narration.
One purchase, against hours that come back every single week you write software.
These aren't hypothetical use cases. This is the actual shape of an engineer's day, rebuilt around the fact that you can talk faster than you can type.
Claude, Copilot, Cursor: they all do their best work when you give them full sentences with context and constraints. Speaking one costs a breath. Typing one costs your flow. Guess which one you'll actually do at 4pm.
Say what changed and why, straight into the terminal. Land a message future-you can actually use, in the time it used to take to type “wip”.
Answer the reviewer in full, in one breath, then go straight back to your file. Their PR unblocks now, not after lunch.
Commands, one-off scripts, a quick Python check. Works in raw terminal text and Vim buffers, no GUI text field required.
Code mode leans into developer vocabulary; Message keeps Slack casual. Switch from the menu bar.
Teach it your function names, libraries, and jargon once. It stops guessing and starts getting them right.
Every transcription is kept as text on your Mac. The agent brief from Tuesday, the repro steps you dictated last sprint: grep-able, not gone.
Linear tickets with real repro steps, RFC first drafts that read like an explanation, five Slack threads cleared while the build compiles. The prose stops being the expensive part.
“I brief Claude Code by talking to it the way I'd explain a bug to a teammate. Full context, constraints, edge cases, in one breath. Typing that out used to make me skip half of it.”
“My commit messages went from ‘fix bug’ to actually explaining the fix, because saying it takes four seconds and typing it took me out of the zone entirely.”
“Our code is under NDA with three different clients. The fact that nothing leaves the laptop wasn't a nice-to-have, it was the only reason I was allowed to install it.”
Cloud dictation tools send your audio, and everything you say about your codebase, to someone else's servers. If you're narrating proprietary logic, an unreleased feature, or a client's private repo, that's a real liability. OpenWhisper does the entire job on your hardware. The only network request it ever makes is downloading the model, once.
OpenWhisper runs Whisper through Core ML on the Apple Neural Engine, the chip your Mac already paid for. Nothing waits on a network, so nothing slows you down mid-sentence, whether you're at your desk or on a plane with no wifi.
Transcription runs on dedicated ML silicon, not your CPU, so your build, your tests, and your editor stay responsive while you dictate.
A hardware-aware recommendation on first run. After that, dictate on a plane, on a train, in a basement with no signal.
A menu bar app that idles quietly and wakes when you hold the key. No Electron, no daemon competing with your build for CPU.
Whisper is trained on an enormous range of real speech, and OpenWhisper's Code mode is tuned for developer vocabulary: camelCase and snake_case spoken aloud, common library and framework names, shell syntax.
It won't nail an unusual internal name on the first try, and it doesn't pretend to. That's exactly what the custom dictionary is for: add it once, it's right forever after.
Yes. Add project-specific terms, function names, library names, and team jargon to the custom dictionary, and OpenWhisper stops guessing and starts getting them right. One entry, corrected forever, across every app.
Yes. OpenWhisper types into whatever has keyboard focus: a GUI text field, a raw terminal buffer, a Vim insert-mode session, an Xcode editor pane. If your cursor can receive keystrokes, it can receive your voice. There's no per-app integration to install or break.
The keyboard was the slow part. Holding a key and saying a full sentence is faster than typing it, and because everything runs locally there's no round trip for your thinking to wait on.
The honest caveat: the first day feels strange, like switching keyboard layouts. Most people stop noticing within the trial, which is precisely why the trial is fourteen days and not seven.
Transcription runs on the Apple Neural Engine as you speak, and text lands as you release the key. There's no server round trip to add lag, no queue to wait behind, and no rate limit that kicks in during a long brief. Your hardware is the whole pipeline.
No. Audio and transcription both happen entirely on your Mac, audio is never stored, and there's no telemetry. The only network call OpenWhisper ever makes is the one-time model download. After that, it behaves identically with wifi off, which you can verify yourself in about ten seconds.
macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon. OpenWhisper uses Core ML and the Neural Engine, so an M-series chip is what makes the real-time, on-device experience possible. No account, no license server, no card for the trial.
Because there's no server bill to pass on to you. Cloud dictation charges monthly because every word you say costs them compute. OpenWhisper runs on hardware you already own, so it's priced like software used to be: $196.97 once, free updates, yours for good.
Cloud dictation tools charge you monthly for something that should belong to you: the ability to speak instead of type. OpenWhisper is software the old way. Buy it once, it runs on hardware you already own, and it owes nothing to a server bill.
One-time purchase. Yours forever.
Fourteen-day, no-questions guarantee. Try it in your real workflow: agent briefs, commits, PR replies, terminal and all. If it doesn't earn its place, delete it. Nothing to cancel, nothing was ever charged.
You already narrate your work all day — to agents, to reviewers, to trackers, to teammates. The only question is whether that narration runs at 40 words a minute through your fingers or 150 through your voice, and whether it travels through someone else's servers or stays on your Mac. Fourteen days to find out, no card, no account. $196.97 once if you keep it. That's the whole decision.
Try every feature free for two weeks, in the middle of real sprints, real PRs, real agent sessions. No account to create, no card to enter, nothing phoning home while you decide. Keep it and it's $196.97, once. Delete it and it's gone.
Start free trial macOS 14 or later. Apple Silicon recommended.