Voice2Text

A native macOS menu-bar app for push-to-talk voice transcription. Hold Right Command to record, release to transcribe and paste into the active application.

• Whisper.cpp (large-v3-turbo) with Metal acceleration + flash attention
• Local LLM (Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct-4bit via MLX) for text cleanup and translation
• Zero cloud dependencies — everything runs locally on your Mac

Install via Homebrew

brew tap thobai/voice2text
brew install voice2text

Usage

Start the app:

open $(brew --prefix)/opt/voice2text/Voice2Text.app

Or run as a background service:

brew services start voice2text

Grant Accessibility permission when prompted (System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility).

Controls

• Hold Right Command — start recording
• Release Right Command — transcribe and paste

Modes

The menu bar icon provides mode switching:

• Raw — paste transcription as-is
• Cleanup — fix grammar and filler words
• Translate — translate German to English

Build from Source

Requires Xcode 15+ and CMake.

# Clone
git clone https://github.com/thobai/voice2text.git
cd voice2text

# Build whisper.cpp xcframework
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp.git /tmp/whisper.cpp
cd /tmp/whisper.cpp && bash build-xcframework.sh
cp -R build-apple/whisper.xcframework /path/to/voice2text/
cd /path/to/voice2text

# Build
swift build -c release

# Create app bundle
bash scripts/build.sh

Models

Downloaded automatically on first run to:

• Whisper: ~/.cache/whisper/ggml-large-v3-turbo.bin (~1.5GB)
• LLM: ~/.cache/huggingface/ (~1GB)

License

MIT