2026, swift
Jubaani, push-to-talk dictation that stays on the Mac
A menu bar app for macOS: hold a key, speak, let go, and the cleaned-up text is pasted into whatever app has focus. Speech recognition runs on the device, so no audio or text leaves the machine.
I dictate a lot, and I wanted a dictation tool where nothing I say goes to a server. Jubaani (Hindi and Urdu for "spoken") is my own take on that: a small menu bar app that turns speech into clean text in any app.
How it works
- Hold Right Option and speak
- Let go, and Apple's on-device speech recognizer turns the audio into text
- The text is cleaned up (filler words out, punctuation in, your own dictionary applied) and pasted where the cursor is
There is a second speech engine, Parakeet, to choose from, and a history of what was dictated so a lost paste can be found again.
How it is built
- SwiftUI menu bar app, built with Swift Package Manager and the Command Line Tools, no Xcode
- A small script bundles and signs the app, so macOS keeps its microphone and accessibility permissions across rebuilds
- The rules behind the menu, setup and settings live in a tested core rather than in the views
The site
It has its own product site and brand kit: a static page with a live hold-to-speak demo, a changelog and an FAQ built from Markdown at deploy time.
swiftswiftuimacosspeechon-device ai