Private, reliable dictation for macOS.

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Hold a shortcut, speak, and release—or use hands-free mode for longer thoughts. FnScribe transcribes your voice locally and inserts the result into the app you are using. It lives in the menu bar and stays out of the way until you need it.

Download for Apple Silicon · Download for Intel Mac

FnScribe requires an Apple Silicon or 64-bit Intel Mac running macOS 13 Ventura or later.

1. Open the downloaded DMG and drag FnScribe to Applications.
2. Open FnScribe from your Applications folder. It appears in the menu bar, not the Dock.
3. Click the menu-bar microphone and grant Microphone and Keyboard access when prompted.
4. Hold the fn/Globe key, speak, and release to insert the transcription into the currently focused app.

The default push-to-talk shortcut is the fn/Globe key. To change it, click the menu-bar microphone, click the shortcut button, and press a new key combination.

For hands-free dictation, press fn + Space once to start and again to stop. You can also turn a push-to-talk recording into hands-free mode by pressing Space while continuing to hold fn. Press Escape at any point to cancel without inserting text. The compact flowbar shows the active stage and provides Stop and Cancel controls. Recordings stop automatically after two minutes.

The settings panel lets you choose a microphone and launch FnScribe at login. Smart cleanup is enabled by default. It removes conservative fillers (um, uh, and erm) and understands explicit formatting such as comma, period, question mark, new line, and new paragraph. Repeated number one, number two or bullet phrases become lists. Say scratch that to discard the current clause; for short value corrections, say two, actually three, or use actually make that for an explicit replacement.

The personal dictionary supplies local recognition hints and preserves exact spelling and capitalization. Each entry has a Write as value and an optional Common mishearing replacement—for example, FnScribe and fn scribe. Dictionary entries are stored only in FnScribe's local settings file, with owner-only file permissions, and are never transmitted.

If automatic insertion ever fails, use Copy Last Transcript or Paste Last Transcript from the menu-bar menu. That recovery transcript exists only in memory and disappears when FnScribe quits. If smart cleanup changed the last dictation, Original copies the unmodified transcription for recovery.

The menu-bar icon shows what FnScribe is doing:

• Microphone: ready
• Square: recording
• Three dots: starting, transcribing, or inserting
• Exclamation mark: permission or microphone attention needed

FnScribe currently transcribes English speech.

Speech recognition runs entirely on your Mac using a bundled Whisper model. Audio and transcripts are held only in memory: there is no account, cloud service, transcription history, or notes database.

For broad compatibility, automatic insertion uses a short-lived, concealed clipboard entry and immediately restores the previous clipboard when it has not changed in the meantime. The transcript remains available only in memory for recovery; choosing Copy Last Transcript is the only persistent clipboard action.

FnScribe needs:

• Microphone access to record while you hold the shortcut
• Accessibility (Keyboard access) to detect the shortcut and insert text into the active app

If FnScribe cannot record or insert text, click its menu-bar icon and check that both permissions show Granted. You can also review them in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone and Accessibility.

If macOS no longer recognizes a permission after you move the app, quit FnScribe, keep it in Applications, and grant the permission again.

Building requires Rust 1.85 or newer, CMake, Clang, and the Tauri CLI:

cargo install tauri-cli --version '^2' --locked
./scripts/build-app.sh         # Native Mac architecture
./scripts/build-app.sh x64     # Intel Mac

Architecture-specific app bundles are written beneath target/<rust-target>/release/bundle/macos/FnScribe.app. To notarize and create an Intel installer, run ./scripts/notarize-app.sh x64; the resulting file is target/release/bundle/dmg/FnScribe-x64.dmg.

For development:

./scripts/download-model.sh
cargo tauri dev

The opt-in delivery regression harness exercises the production insertion path against any focused control without adding application-specific runtime logic. See scripts/DELIVERY_TESTING.md for the native, terminal, browser, and Electron test matrix.

To use a different whisper.cpp GGML model during development, set FNSCRIBE_MODEL to its absolute path.

FnScribe is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3. Copyright © 2026 Algorithmic Research Group, Inc.