bigvoice

Offline dictation · macOS

A small model.
A big voice.

Hold a shortcut in any app, speak, and your words land where your cursor is. Speech recognition runs entirely on your Mac: no account, no cloud, no subscription.

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macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon

The bigvoice window while listening: a live orange waveform, a 0:04 timer, and the live transcript with the newest word in orange.

01 — How it works

Two ways to get a word in.

Push to talk

Hold to speak. Release to insert.

⌃⌥Space

Hands-free

Press once to start. Press again to finish.

⌃⌥Return

esc cancels. Both shortcuts are yours to change in Settings.

The floating capsule while listening, with live orange bars and a 0:04 timer. The floating capsule after delivery, with a check mark.
The capsule floats above the Dock in every Space. It never takes focus and resizes to what it has to say.

02 — Why bigvoice

On your Mac. Off the cloud.

Two engines, one app

whisper.cpp on Metal for Whisper GGML models, and ONNX Runtime GenAI for streaming Nemotron Speech.

Reuses what you have

bigvoice finds speech models already on your Mac, including the one the GitHub Copilot app downloads, and uses them in place. Nothing is downloaded twice.

Live transcript

Words appear while you speak. The final pass after you stop is always authoritative.

Works in any app

Runs from the menu bar and pastes into the app you were using. It checks the focus and the inserted text before doing anything.

Never the wrong field

If focus changes while you dictate, bigvoice doesn't insert. Password fields are never filled. Auto-Return is off by default.

Clipboard respected

Your clipboard is restored after insertion, and a newer copy is never overwritten.

03 — Models

Use what you have before downloading more.

At launch bigvoice looks through Copilot's model cache, MacWhisper, superwhisper, VoiceInk, Handy, whisper.cpp and Hugging Face caches, and Spotlight. Need more? Install one of five MIT-licensed Whisper models (32 MB to 190 MB) in one click. Every download is SHA-256 verified.

The bigvoice Models page: a model already on this Mac and a catalog of Whisper models with disk sizes drawn to scale.

04 — Privacy

Your audio stays on this Mac.

05 — Install

Three steps. Then just talk.

  1. 1
    Unzip and move bigvoice.app to Applications.
  2. 2
    Open it and allow Microphone and Accessibility from the setup steps.
  3. 3
    Click into any text field, hold ⌃ ⌥ Space, and speak. Signed with Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens like any other Mac app.
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