My dictation app told me I had run out of minutes.
Minutes. For turning my own voice into text, on my own computer, with my own microphone, using a speech model that is open source.
That sentence annoyed me enough to check what I was actually paying for. The model doing the work is Whisper, which is open. The engine that makes it fast on a Mac is whisper.cpp, which is open. The paid app is, mostly, a very nice wrapper with a subscription attached. So I took an afternoon and rebuilt the one feature I used every day. It is called Yap, it is free forever, and you can have it.
What Yap does
Tap the right ⌘ key. Talk. Tap again. Whatever you said appears wherever your cursor is, about a second later. In your email, your code editor, a WhatsApp box, anywhere you can type. That is the entire app.
- Whisper large-v3-turbo running fully on your Mac, no cloud involved
- No account, no subscription, no minutes, nothing to run out of
- Nothing you say ever leaves your machine
- Open source, MIT licensed, five small Swift files you can read over coffee
The part that surprised me
I expected the hard part to be the speech recognition. It was not, because that problem is already solved and sitting on Hugging Face. The actual work was the plumbing: a menu bar process that watches the right ⌘ key, records your microphone at 16 kHz, and hands the audio to a local server that keeps the model loaded in memory. That last detail is the whole trick. Because the model never has to load, transcription is near instant, running on the GPU you already own.
The model is a 574 MB download, once. After that Yap works on a plane, in a dead zone, or in a country where your favorite AI company does not operate. It does not know the difference.
Try it
If you have an Apple Silicon Mac and Homebrew, install it with one command:
git clone https://github.com/dertuman/yap && cd yap && ./install.shGrant the two permissions macOS asks for, tap right ⌘, and start talking. Everything else is at github.com/dertuman/yap.
If you try it, tell me what breaks. And if you are paying monthly for software that runs entirely on hardware you already own, it is worth asking what exactly you are renting.