Developer & ITOriginal Reddit post

[OS] (YapToText, Mac App Store) - my free, open-source alternative to WhisperFlow and superwhisper. Looking for testers!

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My hands don't work so I am completely dependent on dictation apps. But I don't want to pay insane subscriptions for features I can create locally. So I created this beautiful app to say goodbye to those subscriptions. Because why should somebody have to pay for accessibility? The problem is every good dictation app wanted a monthly subscription, and most of them sent my voice off to a server to do it. I didn't want to rent the ability to use my own computer, and I didn't want my voice leaving my Mac to do something my Mac can do on its own. So I built the app I actually needed, and I made it free. It's called YapToText, and it does what the paid ones do: - 100% on your Mac. The speech model and the AI cleanup are built into the app, so it works offline the second you open it. No account, no cloud, nothing tracked. - Press one key, talk, and your words land wherever your cursor is, in any app. - Smart Auto mode reads what you're saying and formats it for you: an email comes out as an email, a quick message stays casual, everything else just gets cleaned up. - Modes for raw transcription, clean up, notes, email, code, or write your own. - Convenience features: Fix words it mishears, transcribe any audio or video file, full searchable history, and more. - One-tap AI Actions rewrite selected text in any app: Improve Writing, Fix Grammar, Make Concise, Make Formal, Make Friendly, Summarize, Translate to English. - Per-app modes: it auto-switches based on the app you're in, and one-click Regenerate redoes any dictation as a different mode. - Voice commands for punctuation, emoji, and snippets ("insert phone number" types your real number). - Auto amplification so you can whisper and still be heard, hold-to-talk or tap-to-toggle, and silence auto-stop. - Remappable hotkeys down to a single bare key, and a floating live panel you can position and resize. - Crash recovery rescues an interrupted dictation, plus local stats and swappable speech models (43+ languages). - A menu bar quick panel and a Utility page that breaks the whole pipeline into steps. All on-device, still free. - Built for accessibility first: works with VoiceOver and Voice Control, and one key starts everything. It's a genuine alternative to WhisperFlow, SuperWhisper, and the rest, except it's free and open source. You never pay, and because the code is public you can check exactly what it does with your voice (which is nothing: it never leaves the machine). I'm one disabled developer and I need some testers. It just went live on the Mac App Store and I would love real people using it in real life, on different Macs, with different accents and workflows, telling me what breaks or feels off. If you dictate a lot, or you've been paying for one of these apps and quietly resented it, I would genuinely love your eyes on it. Download (free, Mac App Store): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yaptotext/id6786382289?mt=12 Features coming soon: smart dictionary development, quick edit detection, pop-up customizability, and so much more. Speech to text dictation, free, with powerful tools. Thank you. :)

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u/RyleighNOP

I also had so much fun making animations.... This is in the menu bar ! LOL. The Capy blinks and every once in a while he might sneeze....

u/higl-devReply

Cute. Actually, seems like a missed opportunity to not have named this Yapybara .

u/alespoio

What advantages does this have over the keyboard’s dictation button ?

u/Easy-Cobbler-1631

Going to give a go and send you feedback, I have about 3 similar tools to compare with. All the best with this.

u/theLightSlide

Looks great! Congratulations. Looks like I have to wait til I give up and upgrade to OS X 26 before I can try it, unfortunately.

u/Lecter

Thanks for this! I was trying to figure out how I was going to be able to afford SuperWhisper, and now I won't have to. Hooray! Kicking the tires now, Will use it during my workday tomorrow and give you more feedback. How do you want feedback? Here? On GitHub? Two things that I'd like to request: One—can I use the Fn key to trigger it? Second—can you add other icons for the menu bar icon? The current one is cute, but I'd like something that looks a bit more professional.

u/Bubbly-Celebration63

Cool app, the world needs more accessibility-first solutions and AI is a huge win for that segment. Just one question: why is the app nearly 4GBs? Are you not using Apple's built in frameworks?

u/dsol-7

Man this is amazing! You need to make iOS app right away. I definitely will be trying it out. Thank you!

u/Success-Beautiful

I’m testing this tomorrow morning, looks good! I love capybaras

u/-FurdTurgeson-

You did a really great job on this, it's very thoughtful. Sent you a in-app tip.

u/randomname97531

The animation and UI look sick and I so want to try it. But unfortunately, I'm on macOS 15 and will update to macOS 27 directly. By any chance, do you have any plans of supporting macOS 15 as well? Also I saw the download size is about 3 GB and you wrote that the model is built into it. Does it use Whisper Large models?

u/shawnjoe

Nice, good to see open source here, dictation app subscriptions have gotten ridiculous. Does it run fully offline? Curious about latency vs superwhisper on Apple Silicon.

u/cronberry

This looks really good! Congratulations on the launch and good luck with it. Will test it out over the next few days. +1 for the comment for real time text insertion - I find that helpful for maintaining my dictation flow.

u/kevinpiac

Congrats on this initiative! Keep up the good work, the UI looks great and I am sure it will help a ton of people!

u/Aggravating_Ad6342

Hey! Tried to check it out, but running into a an issue. I'm using a Spanish App Store account. When I click to download/get it, it just freezes on this popup prompt and doesn't load the buy button or finish processing. Never seen this happen with other apps before, so I'm not sure if it's a Mac App Store glitch on my end or an availability/IAP configuration issue in certain regions. Attached a screenshot for context

u/mihhhau

Is it possible to map different keyboard shortcuts to different modes (prompts that transform the text)?

u/Lagarto2955

Why does the Apple Store say there are purchases—in other words, it's not free?