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Nib

※   Voice dictation, quietly.

Voice is the
new pen.

Free, local voice dictation for Mac. Hold a key, talk, paste — your words appear in whatever app you're in.

Download for Mac

Free  ·  macOS 26+  ·  Apple Silicon

Screenshot of Nib running in the macOS menu bar — a small ink-black dot indicating active dictation, with the words 'Voice is the new pen.' appearing as live transcription in a text editor below.
Hero visual placeholder — to be replaced with a real product screenshot.

How it works.

  1. I. Hold

    Press and hold the Right Option key.

    A single, unobtrusive keystroke. No window pops up. No mode to leave. The hotkey is yours to remap.

  2. II. Speak

    Talk normally — “ums” included.

    Nib transcribes on-device, then quietly removes filler and fixes punctuation with an on-device language model. Your voice, intact.

  3. III. Release

    Let go. Text lands at the cursor.

    Mail, Slack, Xcode, a Google Doc, the URL bar — anywhere you can type, you can talk. Nib pastes and disappears.

Why Nib.

Free forever.

Not a trial, not a freemium tier, not "free for personal use." Other voice tools charge $15 a month. Nib is $0, with no asterisk. Built by one person who got tired of typing.

100% private.

Audio is captured, transcribed, and cleaned up entirely on your Mac. No cloud round-trip, no server logs, no “anonymized” analytics. Pull the ethernet cable; Nib still works.

Zero setup.

Open the .dmg, drag to Applications, grant the accessibility prompt, press Right Option. That's the tutorial. No accounts, no onboarding carousel, no opinions about your workflow.

  On privacy

Your voice
stays on
your Mac.

When you press the hotkey, Nib opens the microphone and transcribes what you say with on-device speech recognition. The transcript is then tidied — filler words removed, punctuation restored — by an on-device language model. Both steps run on your Mac. No request is made to any server. There is no telemetry, no crash reporter, no account, no sign-in. After the first-run model download, Nib works offline forever.

Audio is captured while you hold the key and discarded as soon as the transcript is produced. The transcript itself is pasted into the active app and not retained by Nib. Nothing is transmitted off your Mac.

An honest table.

Feature comparison: Nib, a paid cloud dictation app, and macOS built-in dictation.
  Nib Paid cloud dictation macOS built-in
Price $0  forever ≈ $15 / mo Included
Runs locally ✓  Speech model + on-device LLM — Cloud transcription ✓ Local (small model)
Quality Pro-grade, with LLM cleanup Excellent Adequate; rough on jargon
Works in any app ✓ Pastes at the cursor ✓ ✓
Custom hotkey ✓ Choose your modifier key ✓ — Limited preset shortcuts
Account required — None Yes — None

Cloud dictation tools are genuinely good. Nib is a different trade-off: keep the work on your machine, keep the price at zero, accept whatever quality ceiling that implies.

Competitor categories are summarized; specific products and pricing vary.

↓   Get Nib

One file.
No account.

Drop it into Applications, grant accessibility, hold Right Option. That's it.

Download Nib 0.1  ·  .dmg
Version
0.1.0  ·  2026-04-28
Size
2.3 MB
SHA-256
a4f7 1b30 28ec …

Requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later · Apple Silicon · ≈ 400 MB on first-run for the speech model