You talk. It writes.
Hold a key. Speak. Clean, formatted text appears in whatever app you're in — done before you've found the cursor.
macOS 26+ · Apple Silicon · Free
- No account
- Audio and text never leave your Mac
- Free — no subscription
macOS today. Windows soon.
The demo is the interface.
A quiet capsule appears while you talk — your words materialize live, in purple. Let go, and the clean version is already in your document.
Demo: while a key is held, spoken words appear in a capsule; on release, formatted text appears in the document.
Real interface, real speed. No video — this is HTML.
Your dictation audio and text never leave your Mac.
Habla listens with Apple's on-device speech engine and formats with Apple's on-device model. There's no account, no cloud, no analytics — nothing to send and nowhere to send it.
The only time Habla touches the network: checking for and downloading updates. That's it — and you can watch.
- No account, ever
- Processed on the Neural Engine
- Run Little Snitch — the only traffic you'll see is the update check
What it does.
Hold Right-⌘. Talk. Let go.
Push-to-talk, like a walkie-talkie for text. Right-⌘ sits under your thumb and conflicts with nothing.
The formatting dial.
Raw, Light, or Full — the same words, reshaped.
ok so um three things one the demo two the invite and uh three lunch
Works in every app.
Mail, Notes, Slack, your IDE, that one weird Electron app — if a cursor blinks there, Habla types there.
Your words, learned.
Names, jargon, the stuff autocorrect mangles — add it once, Habla spells it right.
Bilingual by birth.
Dicta en spanglish. Habla keeps both languages exactly as you said them — no forced translation.
Never steals your cursor.
The capsule is a ghost: it never takes focus, so your text lands exactly where you were typing. About a second after you let go, it's written.
Free. Actually free.
I built Habla for myself and I'm its heaviest user. Your Mac does all the work, so there's no bill to pass on — and updates ship because I want them, not because a plan renews.
| Comparison | Habla | Cloud dictation apps* |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0, forever | Free tier ~2,000 words/week; ~$12–15/mo for unlimited |
| Words per week | Unlimited | Capped unless you pay |
| Where audio is processed | On your Mac, always | Uploaded to their servers |
| Account required | None | Yes |
| What leaves your machine | Nothing but update checks | Your voice |
*Representative public pricing for cloud dictation apps, July 2026. Verify before each deploy.
¿Listo?
Hold a key and talk. Your Mac does the rest.
Habla-1.0.0.dmg · macOS 26+ · Apple Silicon · 3.5 MB
Signed and notarized by Apple.
Installing: drag Habla into Applications →Installing Habla — three steps
- 1. Drag to Applications. Open the .dmg and drag Habla onto the Applications folder.
- 2. Open from Applications. Launch Habla from your Applications folder (not from the disk image).
- 3. Allow three permissions. On first launch Habla walks you through Microphone, Input Monitoring, and Accessibility — the grants it needs to hear the hotkey and type for you. Nothing leaves your Mac.
Requirements
- macOS 26 Tahoe or later
- Apple Silicon (M1 or newer)
- Apple Intelligence enabled
Steep? That's the trade. The speech and language models Habla uses ship inside macOS — which is exactly why it can be free, private, and fast.
Will my Mac run it?
Any MacBook/iMac/mini with an M-series chip, on macOS 26, with Apple Intelligence turned on (System Settings → Apple Intelligence & Siri).