Utter

Utter is a proprietary dictation app for macOS that transcribes speech with local Whisper models. It's for people who want to speak into everyday apps or coding tools while keeping their audio on their own computer. Transcription runs on your Mac, and no audio leaves the device.

Its system-wide push-to-talk works wherever you'd normally type. That includes browser text fields in Google Docs, Gmail, Notion, ChatGPT and Claude, as well as native apps such as Apple Notes, Messages, Mail and Slack. You can also dictate into Cursor, Terminal and iTerm2, or enter prompts in Claude Code and Codex.

The distinction is where speech recognition happens: Utter uses Whisper on your hardware rather than sending recordings to a cloud transcription service. It works offline after the initial setup downloads the local runtime. You don't need an account. Dictating into an online service doesn't make that service local; Utter handles the speech-to-text part on your Mac.

Utter includes multiple transcription modes and requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. It needs about 1 GB of free disk space, including room for the local runtime.