Just

fnTalk

Hold a key. Talk. Let go.

The text appears wherever your cursor was. It runs entirely on your Mac — no account, no upload, no internet — and nothing you say ever leaves it.

Version 1.0 · 1.9 MB · Works offline · macOS 26 or later, Apple silicon

The whole thing

Put the cursor somewhere. Hold the key. Talk.

Let go and the words are there. No window to open, no button to find, nothing to click when you are done. fnTalk lives in the menu bar and has no Dock icon — you hold a key and it appears.

A tap too short to be speech is ignored, so brushing the key does nothing. Press Escape while still holding to throw a dictation away.

Offline

It does not need the internet. At all.

Not "works offline too". There is no server, no account, and no upload — the transcription is the speech model built into macOS, running on the Neural Engine on your own machine. On a plane, on a hotspot, on a dead connection, it behaves exactly the same as it does at your desk.

Which also means there is nothing to trust. A dictation app you talk into all day hears everything: client names, addresses, things you would not paste into a web form. Here that question does not come up, because nothing is sent anywhere for you to have to think about.

Internet

Not required. Not used.

Account

None. There is nothing to sign up for.

Download size

1.9 MB. Not a typo — there is no model to ship, because macOS already has one.

Your transcripts

Stay on your Mac, in a folder you can open and empty.

Cloud cleanup

Coming later, as an OPTION you switch on. Off by default, per-app, and it will send text — never audio.

Profiles

Different apps, different results

What you dictate into Messages should not read like what you dictate into Mail. fnTalk sees which app is in front and cleans up accordingly — all of it locally, all of it rules rather than a model, so it never changes a word you said.

Messages, Slack

Left short and casual. No trailing full stop where none belongs.

Mail, Notes, browsers

Sentences closed properly, paragraph breaks where you asked for them.

Terminal, editors

No full stop tacked onto the end of a command.

Claude, ChatGPT

Filler and false starts removed, so the instruction reads as one thought.

Everything else

Punctuation and filler cleanup. Your words, tidied.

Every profile is editable and you can add your own, matched on the app. Deeper rewriting — turning a spoken ramble into a written instruction — is what the optional cloud step will add later. Nothing today depends on it.

Punctuation

Both ways, at the same time

macOS punctuates from your pauses and intonation, so most sentences come out right without you doing anything at all.

And if you are in the habit of saying it — period, comma, question mark, new paragraph — that works too. Say nothing and nothing changes. It knows the difference between the command and the word, so “a period of time” stays as words.

Names

It learns the words you actually use

Client names, venues, jargon. Add a word and it goes to the recognizer before it decodes, so it is spelled right in the first place rather than corrected afterwards.

Anywhere

Select the word, right-click, Services → Add to fnTalk vocabulary.

Menu bar

Copy a word and pick it out of the menu.

Suggestions

It reads your own transcripts and offers names you have said more than once. Nothing outside fnTalk is watched.

Setting up

Three permissions, and one setting

macOS asks for each of these separately, and every one fails silently when it is missing. So fnTalk walks you through them on first launch and ends by watching a real dictation happen — key seen, voice heard, text produced — rather than telling you it worked.

Accessibility

Types the text into the app you were using.

Input Monitoring

Sees the key you hold. A different permission from Accessibility, and the one people miss.

Microphone

Hears you, only while the key is held.

If you use the fn / 🌐 key, set System Settings → Keyboard → “Press 🌐 key to” to Do Nothing, or holding it opens the emoji picker at the same time. Prefer a different key? Right Option, Command, Shift and Control all work.

Get it

macOS 26 or later, Apple silicon. Signed and notarised, and it installs itself — double-click it on the disk image and it moves into Applications, replacing an older copy if there is one.

Nothing to sign up for, and nothing to connect. Install it, grant three permissions, and hold a key.

Just fnTalk.

Built by GoodEye in Santa Cruz, California.