Yubi

BetterVoice is an experimental, open-source macOS menu-bar app for local voice dictation with screen context. It transcribes speech locally and captures the full display whenever the user circles an area with the pointer, marking each capture with a blue pointer trail and pulse while preserving multiple references in order. The app inserts the transcript into the selected text field when macOS permits it and pastes captured images when both speech and screen context are available. It supports quick notes and long explanations, configurable microphones, dictation languages, circle-detection thresholds, and keyboard shortcuts. English uses a local Parakeet model by default, while other languages use a separately downloaded multilingual model; an optional English-only grammar-cleanup feature runs locally through quantized ONNX weights.

Yap is a free, open-source voice-dictation app for macOS developed by Frigade. It runs in the menu bar, uses macOS 26's SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber APIs for on-device streaming speech-to-text, and ships no transcription model of its own. A keyboard shortcut starts and stops recording; the resulting text is pasted into the active text field, while transcripts are saved locally for later copying. It requires an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 26, uses no account, API key, or network connection, and is distributed as a signed and notarized app, a disk image, or a Homebrew cask.

Qwen Scribe is a private, local transcription and system-wide dictation application for Apple Silicon Macs. It runs Qwen3-ASR through mlx-qwen3-asr on the Mac's Metal GPU, keeping audio and transcripts on the computer without an account, API key, or cloud service. Users can drag audio or video into a local web interface, transcribe with automatic or forced language selection, vocabulary hints, word timestamps, and SRT export, and search or export local transcript history. A menu-bar helper provides push-to-talk dictation in text fields, displaying listening and transcription states in a non-focus-stealing HUD before pasting the result at the cursor. The project requires macOS 14 or newer, Apple Silicon, Python 3.12 or newer, and ffmpeg for non-WAV audio and video. It offers Qwen3-ASR 1.7B and 0.6B model options; model weights are downloaded separately and require roughly 3.4 GB or 1.2 GB of unified memory respectively, in addition to application overhead. It is distributed as a downloadable beta Mac app or can be built from source; the repository describes the project as version 0.2.1-beta.1.

Voicebox is a local-first, open-source AI voice studio developed in the jamiepine/voicebox repository. It combines voice cloning, text-to-speech, speech-to-text dictation, voice profiles, audio effects, and agent voice output in a desktop application. It generates speech through seven switchable TTS engines, including Qwen3-TTS, Qwen CustomVoice, LuxTTS, Chatterbox, HumeAI TADA, and Kokoro, and supports voice cloning from reference audio, preset voices, multilingual generation, automatic text chunking, crossfading, and multi-track story editing. Whisper-based transcription powers global dictation, in-app recording, and the transcription API; an optional local Qwen3 LLM can refine dictation or rewrite text according to a voice profile's persona. The application exposes REST endpoints for speech generation, agent speech, transcription, and profile management, plus a built-in MCP server with tools for speaking, transcribing, and browsing captures and profiles. It runs models and stores voice data locally, using Tauri with a React/TypeScript frontend and FastAPI backend; platform backends include MLX on Apple Silicon and PyTorch on CUDA, ROCm, XPU, DirectML, or CPU. The repository is licensed under the MIT License and provides macOS, Windows, and Docker distribution, with Linux build-from-source instructions.