Wave

Hold Right Option, speak, and release. That's the whole interaction, and it works in any app because Wave runs in the background rather than as a window you have to find. You can rebind both the dictation and AI Mode shortcuts in Settings, and switch between hold-to-talk and press-to-toggle recording.

The default engine runs OpenAI's Whisper model entirely on your Mac. Audio is handled in memory, never written to disk, and never sent anywhere, so private or confidential speech stays private. That's the heart of its offline speech to text promise. It also means dictation keeps working with no internet connection once the model is downloaded.

When latency matters more than airtight privacy, you can route transcription through Groq's API and get results close to instantly. You bring your own Groq API key. The app itself stays free. Local Whisper remains the fallback, so you're not locked into one path.

AI Mode sends your spoken intent to an LLM and pastes the finished reply at your cursor, so you can describe what you want instead of dictating every word. Selection Mode goes further: highlight text, hold the shortcut, say what to change, and Wave rewrites it in place. Both turn the app from a transcriber into a light editing assistant.

You can bias the model toward specific names, acronyms, and product terms so it stops mangling the words you use most. Snippets store reusable blocks of text, and AI Mode understands them, which cuts down on repeating yourself in routine replies.

Recent transcriptions are kept in a history list with a right-click copy option, handy when a paste lands in the wrong place. Language can be auto-detected or fixed to a specific ISO 639-1 code. Want a different mic? Choose any input device rather than the system default.