The first public build of YapScribe. Apple Silicon, macOS 14 Sonoma or later.
Dictation
- Press both Shift keys together to start, and again to stop. Your voice is transcribed on your Mac by a Whisper model you download — Whisper Small, or Whisper Large v3 Turbo on a Mac with 16 GB of memory or more. It runs on the Neural Engine.
- Prefer a different gesture? Settings offers a double-tap of Shift, or a shortcut you record yourself, alongside the two Shift keys — which stay the default.
- Hold to talk. Hold your trigger down for longer than a quarter of a second and the dictation finishes the moment you let go. A quick tap still starts one and leaves it running until you press again.
- Say “scratch that” on its own — the whole utterance and nothing else — within a minute and still in the same field, and the dictation before it comes back out.
- The finished text is pasted into whatever field you were working in, as a single paste, so one ⌘Z takes all of it back.
- No text field to type into? The words go to your clipboard with a Paste button on the overlay, rather than being dropped.
- Dictation is refused in password fields, and while any app holds secure input — before the microphone opens if the field was already secure, and before anything is polished if it turns secure while you are speaking.
Screen context
- Before transcribing, YapScribe takes one screenshot of the display you are working on and reads it with macOS’s own text recognition, on your Mac, so names and jargon in front of you come out spelled right.
- The screenshot is held in memory for one dictation and released. It is never written to disk and never leaves your Mac.
- Screen Recording is optional. Without it, YapScribe reads the text of the window you are typing in instead.
Polishing, and where it happens
- Grammar, filler words, mid-sentence self-corrections, punctuation, and a tone that matches the app you are writing in.
- Bring your own key: OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Google Gemini, xAI, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Keys live in your Keychain.
- Local polish (advanced) — Ollama or LM Studio on your own Mac, prefilled and one Test button away. Nothing leaves the machine.
- Or YapScribe Cloud credits: $10 for 100,000 words, nothing recurring.
- Polishing can be switched off entirely, and the app says in one sentence what each setting sends, before it sends anything.
Your words
- A wordlist of terms that must never be “corrected”, enforced after polishing, whichever model ran.
- An auto-learning dictionary that picks up names from what is on your screen and from the corrections you make — single terms and pairs only, never sentences, never from password fields, with Clear all learned data in Settings.
- The finished text lingers for five seconds in an editable field; fix a word there and YapScribe learns it.
History and recovery
- Every dictation is kept on your Mac — the final text and what the speech model actually heard. No audio, ever. Clear History removes the lot.
- If the app is killed mid-dictation, the next launch offers back what you had said.
Licensing
- Seven-day trial, everything switched on, started by signing in inside the app.
- One payment. Two Macs on a Standard licence, three on a Power one, with fourteen days of offline grace.
- A year of updates included; the app you have keeps working afterwards.
- Signed, notarised, and updated through Sparkle.