Why I built Parakeety
Short version: every dictation tool I tried asked for too much. Apple’s built-in dictation cut off mid-sentence. The cloud apps wanted my voice in someone else’s data lake and a card on file. The good local options were either ugly or a faff to set up. So I built the one I wanted: hold a key, talk, let go, and the words appear at the cursor, with everything running on the Mac. This is the longer story.
The itch
I think faster than I type, and I do a lot of writing where the first draft is the bottleneck: emails, notes, documentation, the prose that now sits in front of so much programming. Dictation should have solved that years ago. In practice it never quite did.
Apple Dictation is fine for a one-line text, but it is tuned for short bursts. Pause to think and the session ends. You also end up saying "comma" and "new paragraph" out loud, which breaks the exact flow dictation is supposed to give you. The cloud apps fixed the accuracy but introduced a worse problem: my voice, and whatever I was dictating, went to someone else’s server. For anything sensitive that was a non-starter, and the monthly bill for a microphone I already owned grated.
The thing that changed
Then NVIDIA released Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3, and it was startlingly sharp for a 600-million-parameter model that fits comfortably on a Mac. It tops the public accuracy leaderboard, it is fast on Apple Silicon, and because of its transducer design it does not hallucinate text during silences the way Whisper-based systems can. The model that would make a genuinely good local dictation app possible suddenly existed. The full primer on what Parakeet is and why it matters on a Mac goes into the detail.
So I wrapped it in a tiny Swift menu-bar app, mapped it to the section key, and made it paste at the cursor. That is the whole product. No account, no subscription, no cloud. The harder engineering was getting a 600 MB model to run on the Apple Neural Engine inside a 2 MB app, which I wrote up separately in how I shipped the speech model.
The principles I held to
- On-device, always. Audio is captured to memory, transcribed, pasted, and discarded. Nothing is written to disk and nothing leaves the Mac. This is the reason the app exists, so I was not going to compromise it for a cloud feature.
- One job, done well. Push-to-talk dictation that pastes at the cursor. No file transcription, no AI summaries, no hands-free control. The narrow scope is the point.
- Buy it once. Because it runs on your machine there is no server for me to fund, so there is no honest reason to charge monthly. $30 once, lifetime updates.
- Be honest in the comparisons. Parakeety is the wrong choice for some people, and I say so. If you need a language it does not cover, or you want to transcribe audio files, I point you elsewhere.
If you want the wider context for where the app sits, I keep a map of the category in the complete guide to local speech-to-text on Mac.
FAQ
- Who makes Parakeety?
- Parakeety is a one-person Mac app. I build it, write the guides, and answer the support email. There is no company behind it beyond me, which is part of why it is a $30 one-time purchase rather than a subscription with a roadmap to justify.
- Why is Parakeety a one-time purchase instead of a subscription?
- Because it runs entirely on your Mac, there is no server for me to keep paying for, so there is nothing to fund with a recurring charge. A subscription would be charging you monthly for software that does not cost me anything monthly to run. $30 once is the honest price for a tool that lives on your machine.
- Why only 25 languages and not a hundred?
- Because Parakeety runs one model, Parakeet TDT v3, and that model covers 25 European languages. I chose it for accuracy and speed on Apple Silicon rather than breadth. If you dictate in a language outside that list, a Whisper-based tool is the better fit, and I say so in the comparisons.
Try it
Parakeety is a Mac menu-bar app. Hold the section key, talk, release; your words paste at the cursor in whichever app you were typing into. Audio never leaves the machine. There is a free 7-day trial with no card required. After that it is $30 once.