Always-on dictation for macOS
No push-to-talk and no window to open. Always sits in your menu bar, hears your voice, and types what you say wherever your cursor is: terminal, editor, chat, or AI agent.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LivioGama/always/main/scripts/install-always.sh | bash
~/code/uploader main
✓ Read src/upload/client.ts
✓ Ran tests · 42 passed
What should we do next?
● Planning changes to src/upload/client.ts…
Staging is green again. Login still bounces to /home on Safari though.
I can look after lunch unless someone is already on it.
add retry with um exponential backoff to the
How it works
There is no key to press. Always waits for your voice, lets you finish the thought, and types it. This is a four-second sentence with the default settings.
Timings are the shipped defaults. The speech itself is illustrative.
60 ms of speech opens an utterance. A 200 ms pre-buffer keeps your first syllable.
A short pause starts transcribing in the background. Keep talking and that draft is thrown away.
0.9 s of quiet closes the sentence. If you sound mid-sentence, Always waits a little longer.
Words the model made up are dropped, your vocabulary is applied, and "um" and "uh" are removed.
The text goes into whatever app is in front, the way you would have typed it.
Auto-Enter presses Return after a short grace period. Hold ⌘ while you speak to type without sending.
What it does
My Voice
Record three short samples and Always learns your voice. The TV, a podcast, a video call, and the person next to you never reach your cursor. Your voiceprint stays on your Mac.
Vocabulary
Correct a mistranscription and Always keeps the fix. Add your project's names and jargon, and they come out spelled the way your team spells them.
Filtering
Speech models invent phrases out of room noise. Always catches them before they're typed. If a rule ever blocks something you really said, it goes to your clipboard so ⌘V gets it back.
Engines
On macOS 26, Apple's engine turns speech into text on your Mac, with no account and no key. Add a Groq key for the cloud, or pick a local model. A local model can also take over by itself if a cloud call fails.
When Zoom or another app takes the microphone, Always stops right away and types nothing. It comes back about 3 s after the mic is free.
After 10 minutes without your voice it pauses itself, and it wakes up when you speak again.
Always types only into the apps you turn on, and stays paused everywhere else. Pause it everywhere at once with ⌃⌥⇧P.
Shortcuts
Type without sending. Hold it while you speak and Auto-Enter is skipped.
Correct the last transcript and teach the fix.
Pause or resume dictation.
Turn Auto-Enter on or off.
Paste raw text, skipping the filters.
Master pause. Stays paused until you lift it yourself.
Every shortcut can be changed in Settings › Shortcuts.
Other dictation tools want to be the center of attention. Always wants to disappear.
From the Always README
Privacy
These promises are written into the product spec as invariants. A change that breaks one counts as a bug, whatever else it improves.
Read the spec ↗Words count only when they were captured while Always was on and, with My Voice enabled, verified as you. A wrong paste is worse than a missed one.
The indicator shows above full-screen apps and stays up at least 600 ms, long enough to read. It appears only while something is happening.
Audio captured during any pause is never transcribed and never typed.
Your voiceprint never leaves the machine, and release builds don't log what you say.
Then go back to holding a key every time you want to talk.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LivioGama/always/main/scripts/install-always.sh | bash
Prefer to install by hand? Every build for Mac, Linux, and Windows is on the releases page.
All downloads ↗