DictateAI 0.2.2

A new look. DictateAI has its own icon: a speech bubble holding a sound wave that settles into a line of text and ends at a cursor. You speak, it types.

• New app icon in the Dock, Finder and on the installer.
• A proper menu-bar icon instead of the 🎙 emoji. The bubble fills in while you're recording.
• The same mark in Settings and on the website.

Everything from 0.2.1 is included: nothing else to install, works offline, and dictating right after launch no longer loses your words.

Install

1. Open DictateAI-0.2.2-arm64.dmg and drag DictateAI into Applications.
2. Open DictateAI. When macOS says it could not verify the app, click Done, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway (the app isn't notarized yet).
3. Allow Accessibility, then the microphone on your first dictation.

Download sizes

• App: 273 MB
• Speech model, on first launch: about 500 MB
• AI cleanup, only if you turn it on: 1.7 GB for English, 4.3 GB for other languages

Requires a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later).

DictateAI 0.2.1

Fixes

• Dictating right after opening the app no longer fails. If the speech engine is still getting ready, the pill says Getting ready and your words are inserted a moment later, instead of "Something went wrong" and lost text.
• Works with no internet. Once the speech model has downloaded, DictateAI starts and dictates fully offline. Before, the speech engine needed a connection every time it started.

Install

1. Open DictateAI-0.2.1-arm64.dmg and drag DictateAI into Applications.
2. Open DictateAI. When macOS says it could not verify the app, click Done, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway (the app isn't notarized yet).
3. Allow Accessibility, then the microphone on your first dictation.

You're dictating about a minute after you open it, while it fetches its speech model once. AI cleanup is optional: turn it on in Settings, and it downloads in the background while you keep dictating.

Download sizes

• App: 274 MB
• Speech model, on first launch: about 500 MB
• AI cleanup, only if you turn it on: 1.7 GB for English, 4.3 GB for other languages

Requires a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later). Nothing else to install.

DictateAI 0.2.0

Nothing else to install. The speech engine (WhisperKit) and the AI cleanup engine (MLX) now ship inside the app, so you don't need Homebrew, uv or Terminal.

Install

1. Open DictateAI-0.2.0-arm64.dmg and drag DictateAI into Applications.
2. Open DictateAI. When macOS says it could not verify the app, click Done, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway (the app isn't notarized yet).
3. Allow Accessibility, then the microphone on your first dictation.

You're dictating about a minute after you open it, while it fetches its speech model once. AI cleanup is optional: turn it on in Settings, and it downloads in the background while you keep dictating.

Also in this release

• Settings shows progress while models download, and slow connections no longer time out after 5 minutes.
• MLX stays the cleanup engine: llama.cpp was benchmarked and was 1.5–2× slower for non-English dictation.

Download sizes

• App: 274 MB (was 127 MB; it now includes the engines)
• Speech model, on first launch: about 500 MB
• AI cleanup, only if you turn it on: 1.7 GB for English, 4.3 GB for other languages

Requires a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later).

DictateAI 0.1.0

First release of DictateAI: private voice dictation for Apple Silicon Macs.

Hold Right ⌥ Option, speak, and clean text appears in whatever app you're typing in. Speech recognition (WhisperKit) and AI cleanup (Qwen on MLX) run on your Mac.

Before you install

brew install whisperkit-cli
uv tool install mlx-lm

Install

1. Open DictateAI-0.1.0-arm64.dmg and drag DictateAI into Applications.
2. Right-click DictateAI → Open the first time (the app isn't notarized yet).
3. Allow Accessibility, then the microphone on your first dictation.

The first dictation downloads the models (about 500 MB for speech, plus 1.8 GB for English cleanup or 4.3 GB for other languages).

Requires a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later). Intel Macs aren't supported.