bshk-app/murmur

Murmur is a small macOS menu-bar app that lets you dictate text into any app by holding a keyboard shortcut. You hold the key combination, speak naturally, and your words appear wherever your cursor is: in Slack, a code editor, a terminal, a notes app, or anything else. The whole process runs on your Mac with no internet connection required. The app uses two on-device speech recognition models that run through a framework called MLX, which is designed for Apple Silicon chips. When you start talking, a lighter model begins typing almost immediately so you see results right away. A more accurate model then catches up a moment later, quietly correcting names, punctuation, and words that sound alike. You get clean text without waiting for any processing step to finish. Murmur supports around 30 languages and can handle switching between two languages within a single recording. It requires macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later and an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer). On first install, it downloads two models totaling about 3.6 gigabytes, which it stores locally after that. Because everything runs on your device, your voice recordings are never sent anywhere. There are no accounts, no cloud upload, and no stored audio. An optional analytics feature can report anonymous usage errors, but it is turned off by default and never touches audio or transcripts. Builds compiled from source disable analytics entirely. You can install Murmur using Homebrew or download a prebuilt app from the releases page. The app updates itself in the background using a built-in update mechanism called Sparkle. The source code is MIT-licensed and organized into a core library (MurmurKit) that handles audio capture and recognition, with a thin app layer on top for the menu-bar interface and settings.