Talk instead of typing. Record instead of explaining.
Voice dictation and screen recording for macOS, in one tiny native app. 100% on-device, free and open source.
Most dictation and screen-recording tools are hundreds of megabytes of web runtime, send your voice to a server, and want a subscription. Yap is a few megabytes of Swift. Speech recognition, cleanup and summaries all run on your Mac using Apple's on-device models, with optional open-weight models you choose and download yourself.
- No account, no cloud, no telemetry. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you point Yap at a server yourself.
- Small and fast. Native SwiftUI/AppKit, ~70 MB of memory, 0% CPU when idle.
- Your files. Recordings are plain
.mp4files with.srtcaptions and JSON notes, in a folder you choose.
- Hold a key and talk; release to paste at your cursor. Double-tap for hands-free; press again to finish. Esc cancels.
- Any key you like. Record your own shortcut: Fn, Right Alt, Right Ctrl, F13, ⌃Space… Windows and 60% keyboards are detected, with sensible suggestions.
- AI cleanup: removes "um"s and false starts, applies self-corrections ("at 3, no wait, 4" → "at 4"), formats lists, and adapts to the app you're typing in.
- Command Mode: select text, hold your Command Mode key, and say "make this friendlier". With nothing selected it writes new text.
- Learns from your corrections. Fix a word right after it's pasted ("Jon" → "John") and Yap adds it to your dictionary.
- Voice commands: "scratch that" drops the sentence before it, or on its own removes your last dictation. End with "send it" or "press enter" to send the message.
- Translate as you talk. End with "…translate to French", or set "Always translate to" in Settings. About 40 languages.
- Spoken maths: "what's 40 plus 20" types 60; "15 percent of 200" types 30.
- Fits in with the text around your cursor: mid-sentence it adds the space and keeps lowercase; names keep their capitals.
- Dictionary and snippets: teach spellings (
chat gpt => ChatGPT) and voice shortcuts (my calendar link => https://…). Snippets can fill in{date},{time},{day},{year}and{clipboard}. - ⌃⌥V pastes your last dictation again, and Yap warns you if it can't hear you (wrong mic, muted input).
- Styles per app: Verbatim in Terminal, Formal in Mail, Casual in Slack, and your usual style everywhere else.
- Preferred microphones: a priority list, so AirPods win when they're connected and the built-in mic is the fallback.
- Detect the language automatically with a Whisper model, for people who switch languages.
- Pause Yap for 15 minutes, an hour or until you resume, so the dictation key stays out of the way while you game or present.
- Your iPhone as a wireless mic. With the Yap Mic companion app, hold the button on your phone and talk from across the room. The connection is encrypted with a key only your phone and Mac share, and it stays on your Wi-Fi.
- Pastes at your cursor and leaves the text on your clipboard, so it's never lost. Searchable history and a words-dictated counter.
- ⌥⇧R records the display under your pointer, or pick a window or app with the system picker.
- Draggable camera bubble (iPhone via Continuity Camera, USB webcams, capture cards), mic and optional system audio, click highlights, 3-2-1 countdown.
- No time limit. When you stop, the video is copied to your clipboard; paste it straight into Slack, Mail or an issue.
- Pause and resume from the recording bar or the menu; it's still one video at the end.
- Full-screen camera: switch the bubble to fill the screen for an intro, then back.
- No distractions: desktop icons are covered by your wallpaper and notification banners stay out of the video.
- Remove Ums & Pauses: one click saves a copy without filler words and long silences, captions re-timed.
- Auto-zoom: the video smoothly zooms in where you click, follows your pointer, then eases back out. The original is kept; one click removes the zoom.
- Blur: draw boxes over emails, API keys or names to blur or pixelate them, for the whole video or part of it.
- Shortcuts on screen: combos like ⌘K appear in the video for tutorials. Ordinary typing never does.
- On-device transcript, captions, AI title, summary and chapters for every recording. Built-in trim, and a
burned-in captions export for places that ignore
.srtfiles.
- ⌥⇧M when a call starts, again when it ends. Works with Zoom, Meet, Teams, FaceTime or anything else, and no bot joins the call.
- Yap records your microphone and your Mac's sound separately, so the transcript knows what You said and what the Others said. Without headphones your mic also hears the call; Yap drops that echo.
- When it ends you get a title, a summary and action items (with who and when), made on this Mac and copied as Markdown, ready for Notion, Linear, Slack or an email. Library → Meetings keeps them with the audio, and every line plays from where it was said.
- Take meeting notes? When a call app starts using your mic, Yap asks (it never starts on its own), and offers to end the notes when the call is over.
- Experimental: name meetings from your calendar and get a reminder when a call starts, and ask your meetings questions like "what did we decide about pricing?", answered on this Mac.
- Backup: export settings, shortcuts, dictionary, snippets and history to one file, and import it on a new Mac.
- Export dictations as Markdown or CSV, choose where recordings and history are saved, see how much space recordings use, and optionally move old ones to the Trash.
A small pill that lives at the bottom of your screen. It shows a live waveform and your words as you talk, and the controls in hands-free mode. Click it to dictate, drag it anywhere. It never steals focus and respects Reduce Motion.
Yap's logo is a ball with three rings sliding inside it. It's drawn live, not from images, and moves with what Yap is
doing: it rolls in at startup, rests in the menu bar, flows faster the louder you talk, loops while generating, does
one quick roll when your text lands, and pulses red while recording. Timing and shape come from a tuning tool
(design/mark/lab.html) and live in design/mark/mark-config.json.
yap:// links let Shortcuts ("Open URLs"), Raycast, Alfred, Stream Deck or a script control Yap: yap://dictate,
yap://command, yap://record, yap://record-window, yap://meeting, yap://camera, yap://copy-last,
yap://pause, yap://resume, yap://library, yap://settings. Add ?action=start|stop|cancel to the dictation
links, ?action=start|stop|pause|resume|discard to the recording one, ?action=start|stop|discard to the meeting
one, and ?mode=full to the camera one. The full list is in Settings → General, where you can also turn the links off.
| Job | Default | Optional |
|---|---|---|
| Speech → text | Apple Speech (built-in, on-device) | Whisper via WhisperKit: tiny (~75 MB) to large-v3 (~1.6 GB), one-click download, or type any model name |
| Cleanup, Command Mode, summaries | Apple Intelligence (on-device) | A second model via Ollama (one-click pulls) or any OpenAI-compatible server (LM Studio, llama.cpp, Groq, OpenRouter…) |
Route each job to Apple or the second model, e.g. Apple for instant cleanup and a bigger model for Command Mode. If the second model is slow or offline, Apple Intelligence finishes the job automatically.
- macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon
- Apple Intelligence enabled for AI cleanup and Command Mode (without it, Yap falls back to rule-based cleanup)
- A microphone (built-in, USB, Bluetooth or an iPhone via Continuity Camera)
- Download Yap for macOS from the latest release.
- Open the downloaded ZIP and drag Yap.app into your Applications folder.
- The first time you launch it, Control-click Yap.app, choose Open, then choose Open again.
Yap is currently free and open source but not Apple-notarized, so opening it normally may show “Apple could not verify Yap is free of malware.” The Control-click method is macOS's built-in way to approve an app you trust. If macOS still blocks it, open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the security message about Yap, and click Open Anyway.
As a last resort, you can clear the downloaded-file quarantine flag yourself:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Yap.app
open /Applications/Yap.appOnly use that command for the copy downloaded from this repository.
Xcode is not required; the Command Line Tools are enough (xcode-select --install).
git clone https://github.com/max-pantom/yap.git
cd yap
./build.sh --install
open /Applications/Yap.app./build.sh alone builds build/Yap.app without installing. With Xcode 26 installed, the build also compiles the
Liquid Glass app icon (Resources/AppIcon.icon, made in Icon Composer) so it adapts to light, dark, tinted and clear
modes; with only the Command Line Tools it uses a static render of the same icon. The app is ad-hoc signed; the build pins its code
requirement to the bundle identifier, so macOS privacy permissions survive rebuilds.
Releases built with an update key check for new versions themselves (Yap → Check for Updates…).
Needs Xcode (free) to put it on your phone:
brew install xcodegen
cd Companion && xcodegen && open YapMic.xcodeprojPick your team under Signing & Capabilities, choose your iPhone, and press Run. Then, in Yap on your Mac, go to Settings → Dictation → Pair iPhone and scan the code with Yap Mic.
On first launch Yap walks you through these (Settings → Permissions shows their status any time):
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
| Microphone | Hear you while you dictate or narrate |
| Input Monitoring | Notice your dictation key (Yap only listens; it never blocks or changes your typing) |
| Accessibility | Paste at your cursor and read selected text for Command Mode |
| Screen & System Audio Recording | Record your screen, or hear the other side of a call for meeting notes, only while you're recording |
| Camera (optional) | The camera bubble |
| Local Network (optional) | Only after you pair an iPhone, to find it on your Wi-Fi |
Everything runs locally. Yap stores:
| What | Where |
|---|---|
Recordings, captions (.srt), notes (.yap.json) |
~/Movies/Yap, or any folder (Settings → Recording → Saved in → Change…) |
Meeting audio and notes (meeting.json) |
Meetings inside the recordings folder |
| Dictation history | ~/Library/Application Support/Yap/history.json, or any folder (Settings → Dictation → History → Change…) |
| Downloaded Whisper models | ~/Library/Application Support/Yap/Models |
| Diagnostic log (events and timings, never what you said) | ~/Library/Logs/Yap.log |
| API key for a custom server, if you add one | macOS Keychain |
The only network traffic is what you ask for: downloading a model, or sending text to a second model you configured. Settings warns you when that model isn't on your Mac.
Issues and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the code layout and built-in debug tools (pipeline self-tests, a slow-motion animation demo, device listing).
- WhisperKit by Argmax (MIT) for on-device Whisper
- Apple's Speech, FoundationModels, ScreenCaptureKit and AVFoundation frameworks
- Motion principles from Emil Kowalski's animation writing
MIT. Yap is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple or any other company whose products are mentioned or used here.