pomvox on-device · macOS
free & open source · v0.2.3

hold a key.
talk.
it’s already typed.

pomvox is dictation for your Mac. hold one key, say what you mean, and let go — the words show up wherever you were already typing, in email, chat, notes, code, anywhere. no filler words, no fixing punctuation after.

1 hold the key 2 just talk 3 it’s typed for you

everything happens on your Mac. your voice and your words never leave it — it even works with the wifi off.

↓ download for macOS

macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon (M1+) · notarized

try it right here

a preview — the real thing runs on your Mac
idle 0.0s
fn hold

one key, anywhere on your Mac

transcriptionApple Neural Engine
cleanupSimpleWords v3, local
network requests0
to: list@pomvox.ai · subject: beta

the cursor is already here — pomvox types into whatever app you were using.

recording · push-to-talk
 

how it works

  1. 01

    record

    hit your hotkey and start talking.

  2. 02

    transcribe locally

    the Apple Neural Engine converts speech to text, in real time.

  3. 03

    clean up

    a local model fixes punctuation, casing, and filler words.

  4. 04

    paste anywhere

    polished text lands at your cursor.

privacy

There is no network code in the transcription path — your audio and words never leave your Mac.

One-time model download on first setup.

Optional anonymous usage stats: nothing is sent until you explicitly choose on first launch, no field in the payload can carry audio or text, and the code is ~370 lines you can audit in Telemetry.swift.

Because pomvox is open source, you never have to take our word for it.

the ledger
audio uploadednever
transcripts stored off-devicenever
works offlinealways
price$0, open source

faq

Yes. Your audio and transcripts are processed entirely on your Mac and are never sent to any server. There is no network code in the transcription path, and because Pomvox is open source you can verify it yourself. Optional anonymous usage stats: nothing is sent until you explicitly choose on first launch, and no field in the payload can carry audio or text.

Yes. After a one-time model download, Pomvox runs fully offline — no internet connection is required to dictate.

Yes. Pomvox is free and open source. The full source code is on GitHub for anyone to read, build, and contribute to.

A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer) running macOS 14 or later.

Any app with a text field — code editors, terminals, mail, chat, notes. One hotkey drops clean text at your cursor wherever you are.

Run brew install --cask pomvox/pomvox/pomvox in Terminal, or download the notarized .dmg from GitHub Releases.

built in the open

Pomvox is chapter one of a public investigation into on-device speech inference on Apple Silicon. The same model weights score ~6.3% WER on one runtime and ~2.5% on another — a 3.8-point gap that shouldn’t exist. I’m publishing the hunt for those 3.8 points as I go: the measurements, the dead ends, and what finally moves the number. If low-latency local inference is your kind of rabbit hole, follow along.

follow the series → the weights → the writing →