VTT for Mac

VTT transcribes using Apple's on-device Speech engines, so audio never has to leave your Mac in the default setup. There's no account, no sign-in, and no analytics running in the background. If you handle anything confidential, this is the whole reason to pick it over a web-based transcriber. Nothing to sign. Nothing to trust.

It's written in Swift and AppKit, which makes it small and instant to launch. No Electron shell. No hundreds of megabytes, no half-second delay every time you open it. The app is macOS only, and the developer says it always will be.

A global hotkey triggers dictation from anywhere, with a live waveform showing that it's listening, so you can tell at a glance whether the app actually caught your key press. When you stop, the text is inserted directly into the active app, so you don't copy and paste between windows. It fits into whatever you're already doing instead of demanding its own window. No new habit to learn. Just press, talk, done.

You can connect Deepgram, OpenAI, or ElevenLabs using your own API key and pick the exact model per provider. OpenAI Whisper dictation, for example, handles accents and noisy recordings far better than a small on-device model could ever manage with the same clip. That's how you trade a bit of privacy for a jump in accuracy on hard audio. Because it's your key, you pay the provider directly at pay-as-you-go rates. No subscription sits in the middle marking up your usage.

VTT lets you send each language to the engine that handles it best, automatically or by hand, which is a bigger deal than it sounds if you regularly switch between languages during a workday. Follow your keyboard input source and the right language comes back, with no engine quietly translating your words into something you never asked for.

You can pre-fetch the on-device language models so dictation is ready the moment you press the key. That avoids the first-use pause when a model has to load, which is a small thing you notice every single day once it's gone. Dictation should start the moment you press the key, and this makes that happen.

Every dictation lands in a local history, newest first, so nothing you've recorded or copied can actually get lost when an app closes or a paste goes to the wrong window. You can re-paste any recent one with a click or grab the latest straight from the menu bar.