Portfolio // In-house tool
Whisper Cone
Dictation that never leaves your Mac.
A local dictation app for macOS. Hold a key, speak, release – the text appears instantly right where your cursor is. Fully offline, no subscription, no account.
A personal project · Apple Silicon · 100% local
The motivation
Why I built this
I dictate all day. Emails, notes, messages, prompts – speaking is simply faster than typing. For a long time I used Whispr Flow for it, and it was good.
Two things bothered me. First: a monthly subscription for something that could just as easily run on my own machine. Second, and more importantly: every spoken word gets sent to the cloud to be transcribed.
And yet Apple Silicon is more than fast enough to run Whisper models locally in under a second. The technology was already sitting on my desk – someone just had to wire it together.
So I built it myself over a weekend. No subscription, no account, no cloud. My audio never leaves the Mac anymore – and dictation still feels instant.
The concept
Hold. Speak. Release.
Hold the right option key, speak, release. The dictated text appears instantly at the cursor position – in Mail, Slack, the browser, your editor, anywhere. No window, no manual copy-paste.
Hold
Hold the right ⌥ key. A subtle overlay shows that it's listening.
Speak
Say what you want to write – in German or English, detected automatically.
Release
Let go of the key. After about 0.8 seconds the text lands right where your cursor is.
The app
Everything stays on device
The history shows every dictation – stored in a local file on your Mac, not in any cloud.
What's inside
100% local
Transcription runs entirely on the Mac via mlx-whisper. No server, no internet connection required.
Push-to-talk
One key. Hold to record, release to insert. System-wide, in every app.
~0.8s latency
The model stays warm in memory. Typical dictations appear virtually instantly.
No subscription, no account
Built once, runs forever. No monthly cost, no sign-up, no login.
German & English
Language is detected automatically or set manually – clean German umlauts included.
History & dictionary
Every dictation is stored locally. Custom terms and corrections the app remembers.
How it differs
Whisper Cone vs. Whispr Flow
The point
Your audio never leaves the Mac.
No upload, no server, no recording kept. What you say is turned into text on your own chip and inserted the very next moment.
Under the hood — Python · mlx-whisper · whisper-large-v3-turbo · Quartz CGEventTap
Download
Try it yourself
Whisper Cone runs on Apple Silicon (M1 and newer). The app isn't notarized through the App Store – on first launch, right-click → “Open”.
Apple Silicon only · macOS · ~288 MB