For Mac · Free · Open source

Typing sucks.
Just unmute.

Dictation that doesn't fall over the moment your Wi-Fi does. No subscription, no account, no telemetry. Just speak — your words land at the cursor.

Download for Mac View on GitHub

macOS · Apple Silicon · signed & notarized · MIT

$ brew install --cask arpitpatel25/unmute/unmute

— Why this exists

Five minutes of talking, then "Something went wrong."

You know the moment. Café Wi-Fi flickers. Wispr Flow times out. You retry. Retry. The transcript never comes — your monologue is gone and you start typing again.

unmute is built for that moment. Cloud when it's fast, on-device the instant it isn't. You won't notice the switch. You will notice that your words still showed up.

— Two keys, two modes

Speak. Or speak instructions.

Fn
Pure dictation
Tap once to start, speak, tap again to send. Raw text lands at your cursor in any app — Slack, email, code, anywhere.
Caps Lock
Voice instruction
Same rhythm — tap, speak a command, tap. Select a Slack thread and say "reply that I can't make the call, I'm out sick" → it writes the message in the input. Select a paragraph and say "three bullets" → done.
Fn→Caps Lock
Chain them
Brain-dump with Fn, then immediately tap Caps Lock and tell it how to shape what you said. Rough thought → polished message in one breath.

— Raw by default

You don't format what you paste into a chatbot.

Most of dictation today ends up in ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor. LLMs don't need your commas. They read raw thought just fine — at the same accuracy.

So unmute pastes raw, like a fast typist would. Want it formatted? Tap Caps Lock and ask — "clean this up," "three bullets," "make it sound less corporate." Two seconds, done.

— Free, and it should be

$15 a month for a wrapper around someone else's model.

The model isn't theirs. The recognition isn't proprietary. It's a small Mac app and an API call. unmute is MIT, free forever. Read every line, fork it, ship your own.

— Yours, not ours

Your voice never visits a server we own.

Because we don't have one. Audio goes to Groq via your own API key over TLS — or runs fully on your Mac. Your key sits encrypted in the macOS Keychain. Nothing phones home. Nothing to log into.

— Built in the open

Issues, PRs, opinions welcome.

Join the discussion · file an issue · fork it.