LocalFlow — free, fully local dictation for your Mac

Free

No account. No subscription. Download it and it's yours.

Private

Speech recognition runs on your Mac's own Neural Engine. It works with Wi-Fi turned off.

Everywhere

Mail, Slack, your browser, your editor — hold Fn and your words land wherever your cursor is.

Your voice stays on your Mac

Privacy here isn't a policy. It's the architecture.

On-device recognition. A state-of-the-art speech model (NVIDIA Parakeet) runs on the Apple Neural Engine. Your audio is transcribed in memory and discarded.
Zero network calls. The dictation path never touches the internet. Turn off Wi-Fi and keep dictating.
No account, no analytics. The app phones nobody. Neither does this website.

Small app, complete toolkit

25 languagesEnglish, Dutch, German, French, Spanish and 20 more — auto-detected.

AI polish, also localOptional cleanup by a small on-device language model: removes the "um"s, fixes false starts, matches tone per app.

Command modeSelect text, hold Ctrl+Fn, say "make this shorter". It's rewritten in place.

Self-learning dictionaryCorrect a name once and it's spelled right from then on.

Voice snippetsSay a trigger phrase, insert a whole block of text.

Hands-free modeDouble-tap Fn to lock recording for longer dictation.

Questions

Is it really free?

Yes. LocalFlow was built as a personal tool and is shared as-is, free. There is no paid tier, no locked features, and nothing to subscribe to.

How can it work offline?

On first launch, LocalFlow downloads a speech-recognition model (about 500 MB) once. After that everything — listening, transcribing, polishing — happens on your Mac's own chip. Airplane mode works fine.

Which Macs does it run on?

Any Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer, 2020+) running macOS 14 or later. Intel Macs are not supported: the speech model runs on the Neural Engine.

Why does it need Microphone and Accessibility permissions?

Microphone to hear you; Accessibility to type the result into other apps. A welcome screen walks you through both on first launch. That's all it asks for — and everything stays on the machine.

macOS asks me to confirm the first launch. Is that normal?

Yes. LocalFlow is distributed outside the App Store, so macOS double-checks the first time you open it. Click Done on the dialog, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway. This happens once. The full install guide lives in the README.

What about the optional AI polish?

If you want filler-word removal and per-app tone, install the free Ollama app and pull one small model. That also runs entirely on your Mac. Without it, LocalFlow still punctuates and capitalizes perfectly well.

Your voice. Your Mac. Your words.