Pines Voice is dictation for macOS that works inside any app. Hold the right Option key, ⌥, say the sentence, let go.
Three of the app’s pages. New Moon by night, Full Moon by day, like this page.
Pines Voice keeps this log on your Mac.
“Hold the right option key, say what you want written, and let go. It turns up in whatever app you were already using, exactly where the cursor was sitting.”
The gesture never changes: hold to talk, tap once to latch it on, Esc to throw the recording away. It behaves the same in every app because all it does is type, so nothing needs integrating one app at a time.
“This one never touched the network. Whisper is running on the Mac’s own GPU, with no API key and nothing leaving the machine.”
Three quantized models download inside the app. Take the machine offline and every one of them still works.
“When you would rather use the cloud, it runs on your own API key and prints what each dictation cost you.”
The key lives in the macOS Keychain and talks to the provider directly. Nothing routes through us, the money included.
“And the log you are reading right now would only ever exist on your own machine.”
Transcripts, word counts and spend are computed on device. No audio and no transcript ever reaches our servers, so this is a fact about how it is built and there is nothing to take on trust.
Neither one runs through us. One needs nothing at all; the other needs a key you already own.
Pines Provider is coming.
Yes. The local engine runs on your Mac: Parakeet by default, or whisper.cpp on the GPU through Metal. The models download inside the app, and after that nothing leaves the machine. No API key is needed.
Any macOS app with a text cursor. Pines Voice types the words at the caret, so Mail, Slack, VS Code, Terminal and Notes all behave the same way, with nothing to integrate.
Hold the right Option key, marked ⌥, speak, and let go. Tap it once to latch it on for a longer take. Press Escape to throw a recording away.
No. The local engine needs nothing. If you prefer a cloud model, add your own OpenAI, Groq or OpenRouter key. It is stored in the macOS Keychain, sent only to that provider, and the cost of each dictation is shown beside the transcript.
Nothing. Pines Voice is free, the whole app with no word limit. You sign in with Google or email to use it.
Yes. You sign in the first time the app opens, with Google or with an email and a password. Signing in needs the internet. The account holds your email, never your audio or your transcripts.
macOS 12 or newer on Apple silicon. It asks for three permissions: Microphone to hear you, Accessibility to place the words, and Input Monitoring to notice the key inside other apps. It lives in the menu bar.
With the local engine, nowhere. With a cloud engine, straight from your Mac to the provider you chose. Pines Rocks runs no server that receives audio, transcripts or the activity log.
Yes. The dictionary holds your own replacements, so a word you correct once comes out right the next time.
From pines.rocks/download, which points at the current build for macOS.