A tiny offline macOS menu-bar app for using whisper.cpp

[anishgowda21]

I made a small macOS menu-bar app that turns a local whisper-server into everyday dictation: click the icon, speak, and the transcript is copied to your clipboard.

I'm using the Base English model, and it works noticeably better for my Indian English accent than macOS's built-in dictation.

How it works

• The app starts and stops your local whisper-server with one button.
• You press the mic, speak, and press stop. A live waveform shows while recording.
• The audio goes to the server and the text is copied to the clipboard.
• It keeps a history of recent transcripts, which you can export as .txt or .md.
• A settings screen lets you pick the model and language.

What it needs

• A Mac running macOS 27 (built and tested on macOS 27). I haven't tested older versions, so let me know if you try it.
• A built whisper-server from whisper.cpp

Why I made it

I originally had to record something, open the terminal, and pass the audio to whisper. I also tried the server's web UI, but I wanted something that felt more like normal Mac dictation. The idea came from the llama.app menu-bar app, whose convenient interface I liked, so I tried the same approach for Whisper.

Honest disclaimer

I didn't write this entirely by hand. I don't really know Swift or Apple's development stack, so I took a lot of help from AI to put it together. This is a small personal utility and not a production-grade app. It works for me, and from what I've seen in Activity Monitor, the app itself doesn't seem to use much extra memory or CPU(Its just 1 MB). The whisper.cpp server does the actual transcription, so it uses the resources you'd expect.

Source

I haven't published the source yet. I wanted to share the idea first and see if anyone else would find it useful. If people are interested, I'll clean it up a little and publish the repo link here.

Screenshots below: