Show HN: Yap – OSS on-device voice dictation for macOS with no model to download
Yap is a new open-source macOS application that provides on-device voice dictation by leveraging Apple's native SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber APIs. It offers a privacy-focused, high-performance alternative to cloud-based transcription services without requiring model downloads.
Why it matters
By utilizing native OS capabilities, this tool demonstrates how privacy-first, lightweight software can outperform traditional resource-heavy AI applications.
Blazing-fast voice dictation for macOS that works anywhere you can type.
Press a shortcut, talk, press it again. Your words land in whatever text field you were using. No account, no API key, no audio leaving your machine.
yap-demo.mp4 What it does Yap lives in your menu bar and waits for a shortcut. Trigger it and a small window appears near the bottom of the screen with a live waveform and a running preview of what you have said so far. Press the shortcut again and the text gets pasted into the app you were already working in. Every transcript is saved locally, so you can go back and copy something again later.
The default shortcut is ⌘⇧D . You can rebind it, or set a single modifier key instead. Tapping right shift on its own works nicely if you have a spare thumb.
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