jcranokc
app-monitor
App Monitor is a local-first macOS utility that provides a native SwiftUI dashboard for tracking application usage, storage, cleanup opportunities, update status, and uninstall impact.
AI repository intelligence
FR-AI / ANALYSISWhy it is worth attention
It leverages newly available macOS 26 Speech APIs to deliver real-time, on-device transcription with lower latency and higher accuracy than Whisper Small, in a tiny 4 MB native Swift app that idles at ~60 MB and never touches the network—no account, no API key, no audio leaving the machine.
Who it is for
- Developers who need hands-free code comments, commit messages, or terminal input
- macOS power users who want to dictate emails, Slack messages, and other text quickly
- Privacy-conscious users who require offline, on-device transcription
- Users with Intel Macs or older hardware that struggle with heavy Whisper models
Use cases
- Prompting coding agents or writing code comments while keeping hands on the keyboard
- Composing emails and Slack messages faster than typing
- Dictating notes or documents without switching apps or using a clunky UI
- Accessibility use for users who have difficulty typing or prefer speech input
Strengths
- Lightweight and fast: 4 MB app, ~60 MB idle RAM, no browser engine, and three thousand lines of Swift
- On-device privacy: no network calls, no account, no telemetry, audio never leaves the machine
- Zero model download: leverages macOS 26's built-in SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber, which are faster and more accurate than Whisper Small per the cited benchmark
- Global shortcut works anywhere you can type; pastes using clipboard restoration that handles Chromium-based apps correctly
Considerations
- Requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later; incompatible with earlier macOS versions
- Not sandboxed (needs Accessibility permission to paste) and distributed outside the Mac App Store
- Language follows system locale only; no built-in language picker yet
README quick start
Yap
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.
Built by Frigade.
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9bd8dae6-49d6-4c06-98b9-878e24dd401f
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.
Install
Homebrew
brew install --cask frigadehq/tap/yap
To update later:
brew upgrade --cask yap
Direct download
Grab the latest .dmg from Releases and drag
Yap into your Applications folder.
Released builds are signed and notarized, so macOS opens them without complaint.
Why we built this
There's no shortage of voice to text tools for macOS, and some of the open source ones are genuinely good. Most of them still run into some mix of the same problems:
- Some cost money, which is a lot to ask for something that's now built into your OS for free.
- Most make you download a heavy model. Whisper weights run to hundreds of megabytes, sit in your RAM, and only feel fast on a recent, high end Mac. It gets especially bad on Intel Macs, where models like Whisper and Parakeet often crash or refuse to run outright, and when they do run, a single paragraph can take thirty seconds to a minute to come back.
- A lot are Electron or web-stack apps, so a whole browser engine idles in your memory just to run a menu bar icon and a settings window.
- Plenty are bloated with settings and modes you will never open.
- Some are closed source, so you are trusting that your audio and transcripts stay on your machine, with no way to check.
What changed recently is macOS 26. It added two APIs, SpeechAnalyzer and `S
Description
Free, open source voice dictation for macOS. On-device transcription with Apple's Speech framework. No cloud, no API keys, no account.
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