Native macOS menu bar app that turns speech into text in under a second. Push to talk, release to paste. No cloud, no latency, no compromise.
No browser. No Electron. No Python runtime. Just native Swift talking directly to the Apple Neural Engine. Every millisecond matters.
Hold the Fn key to record, release to transcribe. Natural as a walkie-talkie. No clicking, no UI.
Text appears at your cursor in whatever app is focused. TextEdit, browser, terminal, Slack—anywhere.
Everything runs on-device via CoreML. Your audio never leaves your machine. No account, no API key, no internet.
The encoder runs on Apple’s dedicated Neural Engine via CoreML. 190× realtime on M-series chips.
Lives in your menu bar. No dock icon, no window. A translucent overlay appears only while recording.
Powered by NVIDIA Parakeet TDT v3 supporting English, German, French, Spanish, and 21 more European languages.
Optionally clean up transcripts using GitHub Copilot—fix grammar, remove filler words, and polish punctuation while preserving meaning, tone, and language.
High-quality grammar and punctuation cleanup. Included with any GitHub Copilot subscription—no premium tokens required.
Quick enhancement for simple corrections. Also included with GitHub Copilot at no extra cost—no premium tokens.
Claude Haiku 4.5 for alternative enhancement style. Uses premium tokens from your GitHub Copilot allowance.
Requires the GitHub Copilot CLI installed and authenticated. Works with all 25 supported languages.
The entire pipeline—from microphone to pasted text—completes before you finish lifting your finger.
Press and hold the Fn (Globe) key. The mic activates instantly—audio streams into a 16kHz buffer via AVAudioEngine. A floating pill overlay confirms you’re recording.
Let go of Fn. The audio buffer is passed to the Parakeet TDT model running on the Neural Engine via CoreML. Transcription finishes in milliseconds.
The transcribed text is placed on the clipboard and a Cmd+V is simulated. Text appears at your cursor. Your original clipboard is silently restored.
OpenWritr stands on the shoulders of exceptional open-source work.
CoreML-optimized speech recognition framework by FluidInference. Provides the Parakeet TDT 0.6b v3 model compiled for Apple Neural Engine with ~190× realtime performance.
State-of-the-art 600M parameter ASR model using Token-and-Duration Transducer architecture. Non-autoregressive decoding for minimum latency. 25 European languages.
Hardware-accelerated inference on Apple Silicon’s dedicated Neural Engine. The encoder model runs entirely on the ANE for maximum throughput and minimal power draw.
Pure native implementation with strict concurrency safety. MenuBarExtra for the system tray, AVAudioEngine for low-latency capture, CGEventTap for global hotkeys.
Requires macOS 14+ and Apple Silicon. The ASR model (~460 MB) downloads automatically on first launch.
# Clone and build git clone https://github.com/trsdn/OpenWritr.git cd OpenWritr swift build -c release # Run .build/release/OpenWritr # Grant Microphone + Accessibility permissions when prompted # Hold Fn to speak, release to paste