ChacharApp — Juan Pablo Castro

← Back to projects

Voice dictation for Mac Stop typing. Start talking.<br>Hold a key, speak naturally and your voice turns into text in any app. Everything happens on your Mac — nothing travels to the cloud.<br>Like Wispr Flow, but free and private .<br>Download ChacharApp See how it works →<br>macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · Free

Mail — New message<br>To: team@company.com<br>Subject: Quarterly report

Your dictation shows up here, right at the cursor…<br>⌘ right<br>Hold Right ⌘ to dictate

Hold Right ⌘ and watch the magic ↑

In action Watch it dictate in 11 seconds.<br>Hold Right ⌘, speak naturally, release… and the text lands already punctuated, right where the cursor is. Nothing to open, and nothing leaves the Mac.

100% local<br>No cloud, no accounts

Neural Engine<br>Accelerated Whisper

Push-to-talk<br>In any app

Private by design<br>Your voice never leaves the Mac

One key Hold Right ⌘. That's the whole interface.<br>No windows, no menus, no mouse. Put the cursor where you want to write, hold the key and talk. It works with the keyboard you already have.

Listening…

Try it: press and hold the highlighted ⌘ — or your physical Right Command.

How it works Three steps. Zero friction.<br>Nothing to open, no copy-paste. It works on top of the app you're already using.<br>01<br>⌘ Hold<br>Press and hold<br>Hold your key. ChacharApp starts listening instantly, with no window in the way.

02

Speak naturally<br>Dictate the way you'd talk to a person. No weird commands, no forced pauses.

03<br>✓ Text ready<br>Release and done<br>The text lands right where your cursor is, already punctuated, in any application.

Privacy + speed Whisper runs on your Neural Engine. Nothing leaves your Mac.<br>We run the speech model locally on Apple Silicon, on the Neural Engine — whichever one you pick, always on your machine. No servers, no subscriptions, and no words of yours travelling anywhere. The app doesn't track you or analyse how you use it: zero telemetry and zero cloud dependency.<br>data sent

~1s<br>from a phrase to text

minutes, no limit

No telemetry<br>No usage analytics<br>No account<br>No network in normal use

You say:<br>“Send the deck to cubernetes over slack before eod.”<br>ChacharApp writes:<br>Send the deck to Kubernetes over Slack before EOD.

Accuracy It tunes to the way you speak.<br>Add your own vocabulary: names, acronyms, technical jargon and brands. With phonetic matching you say “cubernetes” and it writes “Kubernetes” — without ever typing the misspelling into a rule.<br>Phonetic glossaryProper nounsTechnical acronymsAuto punctuationMultilingual

Full control Everything is configurable. Even the engine.<br>Pick your shortcut, your microphone and the speech model. Use the bundled one, download another variant or import your own (WhisperKit CoreML) — and it always runs locally, never in the cloud.<br>Push-to-talk keys, hands-free mode and the microphone privacy policy. The bundled model ready out of the box; download other variants or import your own. Whichever you pick runs locally.

History + privacy Every dictation, stored locally. Only you see it.<br>A searchable local history keeps the raw recognition next to the final text: you see what it heard and what it fixed. Nothing leaves the Mac, no account, no telemetry. My favourite: I dictated its own name and Whisper heard “Chacha Wrap”. What got inserted: “ChacharApp”.

The History tab: the raw recognition “Chacha Wrap” stored under the “ChacharApp” that actually got inserted.<br>Against the alternatives Why choose ChacharApp.<br>Feature<br>ChacharApp<br>macOS dictation<br>Cloud apps

Processing<br>On your Mac<br>On your Mac<br>Servers

Full privacy<br>Partial

Whisper on Neural Engine<br>N/A<br>N/A (cloud)

Custom vocabulary<br>✓ phonetic<br>Sometimes

Offline<br>Partial

Price<br>Free · MIT<br>Included<br>Subscription

The first-launch assistant: three steps that tick themselves off as they complete. First launch Three steps and you're dictating.<br>Download the .dmg, open it and the app itself walks you through it: microphone, Accessibility and the speech model, which downloads on its own the first time. The checklist ticks itself off. No account, no weird setup.<br>View the code on GitHub

Your voice, your text, your Mac.<br>Download it for free and start dictating in under a minute.<br>Download ChacharApp macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · Free