Vocs
Quiet in meetings
On a call, the other people come out of your speakers and into your microphone. While you dictate, Vocs mutes the built-in speakers, and puts them back the moment you stop. Headphones are left alone.
Free · Open source · macOS
Talk.
Talk.
It types.
Press a key, say it, press it again. Your words land in whatever you were typing in, before you can look up. Speech-to-text that runs entirely on your Mac.
· macOS 13 or later · First launch steps
Apple Silicon Intel
Works wherever you can type
- Slack
- Teams
- Notes
- Chrome
- VS Code
- Terminal
- Everything else
01 · How it works
Three beats, and you're done.
No window to open, no text box to click into. Vocs lives in the menu bar and gets out of the way.
-
1
Press ⌥Space
Anywhere, in any app. Toggle it, or hold the key to talk. A small pill shows it's listening.
-
2
Say what you mean
Vocs transcribes while you speak, not after, so a five-minute monologue finishes as fast as a sentence.
-
3
Press it again
The text is pasted into whatever had focus, and your clipboard is put back as it was.
02 · What you get
Small app. Careful details.
99 languages
Let Vocs detect the language, or pin one. Switch mid-day without touching a setting.
Your dictionary
Teach it the names and jargon it gets wrong. It biases recognition and corrects the output.
Fixes, not rewrites
Fillers go, real words stay. Optional on-device grammar fixes only the slips that are wrong every time.
A notebook of everything
Every dictation is kept locally, searchable, and editable like a note. A failed paste is never a lost thought.
Escape takes it back
Press Escape and you get a three-second countdown to cancel. Press it again and the recording resumes with nothing lost.
Crash-safe
The transcript is saved as it grows, so even a crash mid-sentence keeps what you had said.
03 · Privacy
Nothing leaves your Mac.
Recognition runs on your machine. There is no account to make, no subscription, no word limit, and no telemetry. The code is open, so you can check.
- Your audio stays hereIt is never uploaded anywhere. Recognition happens on this machine.
- Two kinds of requestDownloading a model, and an update check you can switch off. Nothing else.
- Signed updatesVocs refuses any update that doesn't verify against the key built into the app.
04 · Install
Up and running in a minute.
Needs macOS 13 or later, Apple Silicon or Intel, and about 600 MB of disk for the speech model.
One universal download: the same file runs natively on both. Not sure which you have? Apple menu → About This Mac.
- Open the downloaded DMG. macOS will say it can't verify Vocs-macOS.dmg. That's expected: Vocs is free and independent, so it isn't notarised by Apple. Click Done, not Move to Trash.
- Approve it in System Settings. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to the message about the DMG and choose Open Anyway, then enter your password. The DMG opens.
- Drag Vocs to Applications and open it. macOS may ask once more, this time about the app. Same place, same Open Anyway. After that it never asks again, and updates inside the app don't ask either.
- Follow the setup. Allow the microphone, download the model, and try your hotkey.
Prefer the terminal? Run this before opening the DMG, and again for the app if macOS asks about it:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Downloads/Vocs-macOS.dmgxattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Vocs.app05 · Releases
What's new.
Every version, with what changed. The newest is always the one the Download buttons fetch; older ones open in place.
No release matches that.
No release is published yet. Watch the releases page or the changelog.
06 · Questions
Good to know.
Is it really free?
Yes. No account, no subscription, no word cap. It is open source under the MIT licence.
Does it work offline?
Yes. After the one-time model download, dictation needs no connection at all.
Why does macOS warn me when I open it?
Apple notarisation requires a paid developer account, and Vocs is a free, independent project. The app is signed, and the steps above approve the DMG and the app once each. After that macOS remembers.
How do updates work?
Vocs checks quietly at launch and once a day, and Settings → Updates has a Check for updates button. Every update is verified against a signature before it is installed, and it won't install in the middle of a dictation. You can turn the check off.
What does it need permission for?
The microphone, to hear you. Accessibility is optional: it lets Vocs paste for you. Without it, your text goes to the clipboard instead.
Can I help build it?
Please do. Read the contributing guide and open an issue or a pull request.