Yap: Free open-source macOS dictation app using Apple's built-in speech APIs
A developer has released Yap, a free and open-source menu-bar app for macOS that converts voice to text using Apple's native on-device speech recognition APIs introduced in macOS 26. The app requires no model downloads, as it relies on SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber APIs that ship with the operating system. Users set a hotkey, speak, and the transcribed text is pasted directly into any active input field, with all processing happening locally and no data leaving the device. Built entirely in Swift, the app weighs just 4 MB, contains no network code, and is licensed under the MIT open-source license. The developer designed Yap to avoid common drawbacks of existing dictation tools, such as subscription fees, heavy bundled models, Electron wrappers, and third-party API access to user transcripts.
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