Hold Fn, speak,get text anywhere.
Lip is voice dictation for your Mac that runs entirely on your Mac. Hold a key, say the thing, and the words land in whatever app you were already typing in in 99 languages, with your audio never leaving the machine. 7 days free, with no key and no email to hand over first.
refactor the auth middleware so it retries on a 429
Free for 7 days. No account, no card, nothing to cancel.
- 0
- Words sent to a server
- 99
- Languages, detected
- $39
- Once, not monthly
No integrations. That's the feature.
Lip inserts text the way your keyboard does, so it has no integrations and needs none. If an app has a cursor, it works — including ones that shipped after Lip did.
Slack
Messages
Discord
WhatsApp
Teams
Signal
Mail
Notes
Obsidian
Bear
Notion
Google Docs
VS Code
Xcode
Terminal
iTerm
Cursor
JetBrains IDEs
Safari
Chrome
Linear
Jira
Figma
ChatGPT
The exception is password fields. While one has focus, macOS blocks synthetic input system-wide, and Lip declines to record rather than failing silently — which is also where you'd want it to stop.
Hold the key
Press and hold Fn, or remap it to whatever your hands already know. A small indicator tells you it's listening, so you never speak into nothing.
Say it plainly
Talk the way you'd talk to a colleague. Lip is tuned for the words developers actually use: variable names, CLI flags, library names, the odd acronym.
Let go
The text appears at your cursor: editor, terminal, Slack, a PR description, a prompt box. Lip doesn't care which app it is and doesn't need to integrate with any of them.
One hotkey, whatever window is in front of you
Lip types into your cursor, so it doesn't need a plugin for each app. Pick one and watch.
Acme Engineering
# general
# eng-platform
# incidents
Priya Sharma
Priya Sharma9:41
Did the retry fix land, or is it still queued behind the migration?
Sam Okoro9:43
Deploy pipeline says green. Waiting on someone to confirm prod.
2 replies · last reply 4 minutes ago
Message #eng-platform
↑Hold Fn to talk
Your thumb never leaves the keyboard. No plugin, no integration, no upload.
Talking is faster than typing. You already know this.
Lip assumes forty words a minute when it calculates how much time you've saved — the same figure the app uses internally, and a generous one for most people writing prose rather than copying it.
What it does not do is tell you how fast you speak. That number is yours, it varies by person and by task, and Lip measures it for real: the Insights view shows your actual words per minute, dictation by dictation. Most people find the gap is larger than they expected.
- 40
- Words per minute, typing
- Yours
- Words per minute, speaking
No invented benchmark here. The only speed figure Lip publishes is the one it measures on your own Mac.
Your voice never becomes someone else's training data
Transcription happens on your Mac, against a model on your disk. There is no audio pipeline to a server because there is no server in the path — pull the wifi out and Lip keeps working.
Lip is not a no-network app, and saying otherwise would be easy to disprove. It makes exactly two calls, both listed beside this, and neither carries a word you said.
- ·Audio is captured into memory and never written to a temp file
- ·Transcription runs on your Mac, against weights on your disk
- ·No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting you didn't opt into
- Model downloadhuggingface.co
Once, if you choose a model that isn't bundled. Sends: nothing but the request for the file.
- Licence activationlip.mylittletools.in
Once, when you enter your key. Sends: the key, a device hash, a device label, the app version.
Teach it the words only you use
Every transcriber mangles the same things: colleagues' names, internal project names, the library you use every day. Lip keeps a plain list of what it mishears and what you actually meant, and applies it to everything it types.
It is a correction list, not a training run. Nothing about your voice is learned, stored or sent anywhere — add a row and the next dictation gets it right.
- ·Plain text, editable in Settings
- ·Import and export, so a team can share one list
- ·Matching is case-insensitive
| Heard | Types |
|---|---|
| cooper netties | Kubernetes |
| post gres | Postgres |
| pee arr | PR |
| biz warrup | Biswaroop |
| next jay s | Next.js |
| oh auth | OAuth |
Some things are faster said than typed
Punctuation while you talk, a saved block from a trigger phrase, and a handful of commands that act instead of typing. All of it runs on your Mac, in the same pass as the transcription.
You say
buy milk comma eggs comma bread period
It types
buy milk, eggs, bread.
- comma
- period
- full stop
- bullet point
- new line
- “my email”parvez@mylittletools.in
- “my address”48 Fitzroy Street London W1T 5BS
- “standup header”**Yesterday** **Today** **Blockers**
- “sign off”Thanks — Parvez
- “undo that”Removes the last thing Lip typed
- “delete last phrase”The same, said another way
- “press enter”Sends Return to the app in front
- “press tab”Sends Tab
- “press escape”Sends Escape
Keystroke commands ship on and can be switched off in Settings — a wrong keystroke in the wrong app is worse than a wrong word. “Undo that” is always on, because it only ever touches text Lip itself inserted.
Commands are matched against what you said, before snippets and dictionary corrections run. A snippet that expands to “press enter” types those words — it never presses the key.
99 languages, and it works out which one you're speaking
Pick the multilingual model and Lip detects the language from the audio rather than making you declare it in advance. Switch mid-day, switch mid-sentence — there is no setting to remember.
The other three are English specialists, and they are faster for it. The one that ships inside the app works the moment you open it, with nothing to download at all.
All four run locally. Changing model changes what's on your disk, never where your audio goes.
- Apple SpeechBuilt into macOSBuilt into macOS. Nothing to download, and nothing extra on disk.Your Mac's language
- Built-in EnglishBundledShips inside Lip. The quickest to answer. English only.English
- Built-in English · Accurate488 MBBetter on names, jargon and fast speech. A beat slower. English only.English
- Built-in Multilingual574 MB99 languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Hindi.Detected automatically
Statistics that stay on your machine
Lip keeps track of how much you actually dictate — words, sessions, your real speaking rate, which apps you talk into and at what hours.
- ·Words, dictations and words-per-minute, with a trend against the previous period
- ·Which apps you dictate into, and how much
- ·Which hours of the day you actually talk
Computed on your Mac, stored on your Mac, and erasable from Settings in one click. There is no dashboard anywhere else, because the data never goes anywhere else.
- 8,420
- Words
- 386
- Dictations
- 132
- Words / min
- +18%
- vs last week
- Slack2,610
- VS Code2,180
- Mail1,690
- Notes1,100
- Safari840
Everything else it does
The parts that don't need a section of their own, but are the reason it stays out of your way day to day.
Two ways to trigger
Hold the key while you speak, or tap once to start and again to stop. Toggle recordings cap at sixty seconds, so a forgotten session can't run all afternoon.
Pick your trigger
Fn by default, remappable to whatever your hands already know. Shortcut guards stop it firing in the middle of a real keyboard shortcut.
You can see it listening
A small overlay appears while you talk, with a live level meter. You never speak into nothing and find out thirty seconds later.
Take it back by saying so
Lip remembers the last twenty things it typed and can remove the most recent on command — its own insertions only, never anything you typed yourself.
Trade speed for accuracy
Apple's built-in recogniser, a bundled English model, a larger English model for names and jargon, or the multilingual one. Switch whenever.
Audio is never a file
Recording goes into a memory buffer and is discarded after transcription. Nothing is written to disk for someone to find later.
There when you log in
Starts with your Mac and sits in the menu bar. The microphone indicator only lights while you're actually dictating.
Works on a plane
Once the model is on disk and the licence is activated, Lip never needs the network again. Aeroplanes, secure facilities, bad hotel wifi.
Cloud dictation costs $144 a year, forever
Subscription tools are good, and they're also permanent. Lip is the other trade: pay once, keep the version you paid for, and know where your audio goes.
| Lip | Cloud dictation, typical | |
|---|---|---|
| Where audio is processed | On your Mac | Their servers |
| Cost | One time | $144 / year, ongoing |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Account needed | No, not even to trial it | Yes |
| Macs per purchase | Three | Per-seat, per month |
| If the company folds | Keeps working | Stops working |
| Scope | Dictation, done well | Expanding well past dictation |
| Where your audio goes | Nowhere — it stays in memory | Uploaded, then deleted on their schedule |
| Languages | 99, detected automatically | Comparable, if you stay subscribed |
| Usage statistics | Stored on your Mac, erasable | Stored on theirs |
| What it sends home | A licence check, once | Every word you speak |
A few months of a cloud subscription, and it's yours after that. Buy it once and every future version is included, forever, with no renewal date to forget about.
·7 free days first, no account and no card
·One person, three Macs
·Every future version included, forever
·Refunded, no questions, if it doesn't fit your work
Narrow on purpose
Lip turns what you say into text at your cursor, quickly and privately. It is not an assistant, it will not rewrite your sentences into something more professional, and it will never grow a chat window.
That last one is a choice, not a gap. Tools that clean up your speech have to understand it first, and understanding it somewhere else is exactly what this product exists to avoid.
The honest edges: it is Mac only. Punctuation is very good rather than flawless. Genuinely obscure words come out phonetic until you add them to your dictionary. Toggle recordings stop after a minute. The 7 free days exist so you can find all of that out in your own apps, before paying.
Does it work in every app?
Mostly. Lip types into your cursor the way a keyboard does, so anywhere you can type, it works. The one real exception is password fields: while one has focus, macOS blocks synthetic input system-wide, so Lip declines to record rather than failing silently. If anything else breaks, tell me and it gets fixed.
How fast is it, really?
Fast enough that I stopped noticing it, on the smaller model. You can trade speed for accuracy by choosing a larger model in settings: bigger model, better on jargon, slightly longer wait.
What happens to my recordings?
They're transcribed in memory and dropped. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is kept. The only optional data is a local crash log you can turn on to help me debug.
Will the price stay one-time?
Yes, and here is the exact shape of it. One payment, and every future version is included — there is no upgrade fee and no renewal date. Not a subscription now, and not one later.
How many Macs does one licence cover?
Three, for one person. Reinstalling, restoring from a backup or migrating to a new disk doesn't burn a slot. If you replace a machine, release the old one and activate the new one from your licence page.
What if you stop working on this?
Lip keeps working. Once activated it never contacts a server again, so if my infrastructure disappeared tomorrow every copy in the field would carry on dictating. There is also an offline activation path for air-gapped machines that never touch the network at all.
Can I edit text by voice?
Partly. You can punctuate as you speak (“comma”, “period”, “bullet point”, “new line”), take back the last thing Lip typed with “undo that”, and send Return, Tab or Escape by voice. What it will not do is rewrite your sentences for you — selecting a paragraph and asking for it to be rephrased is not something Lip does.
How big is the download?
The download is 132 MB, nearly all of it the English model that ships inside the app so it works the moment it opens. The two optional models are fetched from Hugging Face only if you pick them in Settings: 488 MB for the more accurate English one, 574 MB for the multilingual one. Nothing downloads behind your back.
What languages does it handle?
Ninety-nine, including Chinese, Japanese and Hindi, if you choose the multilingual model — and it detects which one you are speaking rather than making you set it. The bundled model and the accurate model are English only, and Apple Speech follows whatever language your Mac is set to.
Does it ever touch the network?
Twice, and only twice. It fetches a model from huggingface.co if you choose one that is not bundled, and it checks your licence key against lip.mylittletools.in once when you activate. Your audio, your transcripts and your usage statistics never leave the machine. You are welcome to verify that with Little Snitch or lsof — the claim is meant to be checked, not taken on faith.
Stop typing the easy parts
Download it, hold a key, and find out how much of your day went into typing things you could have said. 7 days, no account.
Get started on Mac