Pipit Is a Great Free Speech-to-Text App for Mac.
Whatever you say about AI (and I’ve said a lot), the progress in speech-to-text and transcription software is truly impressive. Whereas such software used to be either clunky or expensive, there are now a plethora of excellent open-source tools that work well.
This brings me to Pipit , a free dictation app for Mac that works offline, making it completely private. What’s even more interesting is that it can be used for more than just transcribing speech—it can launch apps, toggle settings, and even run web searches or query an AI service.
When you first launch the app, it will ask for permission to use your microphone before loading the Parakeet model for offline transcription. Once set up, you can use the app by pressing and holding the Option key and then speaking. The app will record your words, convert them to text, and paste them into the currently active text field.
I’ve been testing this for a couple of days now and found that the transcriptions are generally quite accurate, including punctuation. There’s additional post-processing that can turn unstructured speech into a properly formatted document, but it requires an OpenRouter API key.
In the settings window, you can change the launch key, select an input device, and enable/disable the menu bar icon. There’s also a tool for transcribing audio files with speaker identification. Simply drag the cursor over the file, and you’ll get a transcription.
Finally, in the “Enhancements ” tab, you can enable the ” Quick Actions ” feature. This allows you to verbally tell your computer what to do and see the results. To use this feature, start the transcription as usual, but say something like “open Safari” to open the app, or “ask Claude” and then ask a question to start a conversation with this AI assistant in your browser. It’s a bit of an unusual feature, sure, but I enjoyed using it.
It’s great that most tools like these are now free, and Pipit has an interesting set of features.