Productivity
Talkdown
Hold a key, talk, and get clean text on your clipboard.
Get for Mac.dmg · 345 KB · or download .zip
- Category
- Productivity
- Requires
- macOS 13+
- Size
- 345 KB
- Price
- Free
Preview
About Talkdown
Talkdown is on-device dictation: hold a key, talk, and get clean text.
What it does
- Push to talk. Hold Control+Option+Space to record and release to stop.
- On-device. Uses macOS speech recognition set to stay on the Mac, with punctuation.
- Spoken commands. New line, new paragraph, bullet point, camel case, snake case and more.
- Clipboard first. The text is always put on the clipboard, and pasted for you if you allow Accessibility access. The last 10 transcripts are in the menu.
Notes
macOS asks for Microphone and Speech Recognition permission. On-device recognition has to be available for your language.
Information
- Developer
- SiliconDevKit (generated by AI from a prompt)
- Category
- Productivity
- Compatibility
- macOS 13 or later, Apple silicon. Apple silicon Macs only (M1 or later), not Intel
- Size
- 345 KB (.dmg)
- Version
- 1.0
- Price
- Free
- Signing
- Ad-hoc signed, not notarized
The prompt behind it
This app was generated from the prompt below. Paste it into SiliconDevKit to build your own version, then change it however you like.
Build a menu bar app called Talkdown, an on-device voice dictation tool. Hold the global hotkey Control+Option+Space (registered with the Carbon RegisterEventHotKey API, which reports both the press and the release) to record from the microphone, and release it to stop. Transcribe with the Speech framework using SFSpeechRecognizer with requiresOnDeviceRecognition set to true and addsPunctuation enabled, so nothing leaves the Mac, and show a small floating HUD with a level meter while recording. Then clean up the text: spoken commands such as new line, new paragraph, bullet point, open quote, close quote, and camel case followed by words (camel case user name becomes userName), snake case and all caps. Always put the result on the clipboard, and if the user has granted Accessibility permission, paste it into the app that was in front by sending Cmd+V with CGEvent; otherwise show a notification saying it is on the clipboard. Add a menu with the last 10 transcripts, a language picker and a button that opens the Microphone and Speech Recognition settings. No Dock icon.
Opening it for the first time
- Open the .dmg and drag Talkdown onto the Applications folder.
- Open it from Applications. macOS may say it can’t check the app for malicious software. Click Done.
- Open System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. This is needed once. Why this happens. To share an app without the warning, see how to notarize it.
