Overhear

Talk faster than you type.

Overhear turns speech into text in every app on your Mac. Always on, listens, transcribes and pastes wherever your cursor is.

Download for macOSView on GitHub

Free and open source · macOS 14 or later · Apple Silicon

Nothing to press.

Most dictation tools ask you to hold a key while you talk. Overhear was built for working from home. It just keeps listening, and the moment you start speaking, the transcription is placed wherever your cursor is.

Dictation tools
  1. Focus the field
  2. Hold the key
  3. Speak
  4. Release
Overhear
  1. Speak
Cancel word

Say the word. Take it back.

Misspeak mid-sentence, say “Alexa”*, and the whole sentence is discarded before it reaches your application, even if transcription is already running.

Let’s push the review to Thursday morning… Alexa

Four cancel words ship with the app, and custom ones can be installed if you would rather it listened for something else.

* The default is “Alexa”. After years of disappointment, it felt right to give the name a job it could actually do.

Three things it’s good at.

Long-form transcription

Speech is transcribed in batches as you pause, so you can think out loud for a whole paragraph instead of dictating one sentence at a time and starting over.

Works across your Mac

Text arrives through the clipboard and a simulated ⌘V, so it lands anywhere that accepts a paste: Slack, your editor, a commit message, a browser form.

Multilingual input

Pick the languages you actually speak from the 56 available; Overhear detects which one you’re using. Answer an email in Polish, go straight back to English.

Your voice never leaves your Mac.

Transcription runs locally, on Whisper or Parakeet. The model you choose downloads once, and everything after that happens offline.

No accountNothing to sign up for.
No serverAudio is never uploaded anywhere.
No telemetryNothing is measured or reported.
Models

Whisper or Parakeet.

Download the one that works best for you and swap it whenever you like. They all run on your Mac’s Apple Neural Engine.

Whisper

Supports 56 languages, and can translate any of them into English if enabled. Use a bigger model for better accuracy.

  • Tiny

    The quickest to answer and the loosest with what it heard.

  • Base default

    Small, fast and multilingual: a batch comes back before you have finished the next sentence.

  • Base English

    As quick as Base, more accurate on English, and unable to transcribe anything else.

  • Small

    A step up on names, jargon and half-swallowed words.

  • Large v3 Turbo

    The most accurate of the five, and the slowest to answer.

Parakeet

Nvidia’s models considerably faster than Whisper with comparable accuracy. Supports 24 languages.

  • TDT 0.6B v2

    English only.

  • TDT 0.6B v3

    Twenty-four European languages.

Before you install.

Overhear is an early open-source release. Here is everything it needs and everything that happens the first time you run it.

System
macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple Silicon.
Permissions
Microphone and Accessibility, both requested on first launch.
First run
Overhear downloads the model you choose. That takes a few minutes, once. After that it works offline.
Install
Download the DMG and drag Overhear to Applications. That’s it.
Download for macOSView on GitHub