Speak naturally,
type perfectly.
Hold a key, speak, and your words are transcribed and pasted into any app. Optionally, a local LLM polishes the text. 100% local, no cloud.
Hold a key, speak, and your words are transcribed and pasted into any app. Optionally, a local LLM polishes the text. 100% local, no cloud.
All processing happens on your Mac. No cloud services, no subscriptions, no data leaves your machine.
Right Option, Caps Lock, Fn, or any key. Hold to record, or press-to-toggle for Caps Lock.
Searchable history with copy, re-process, download audio, and delete. Never lose a dictation.
Pick any input device directly from the menu bar. Auto-detect or choose a specific microphone.
Ollama can improve your transcriptions — fixing grammar, punctuation, and formatting. Totally optional; works fine without it.
Pastes into any app — your editor, browser, Slack, email. Anywhere you can type.
Grab the latest release, unzip, and drag Parrote.app to your Applications folder.
Parrote is not notarized by Apple, so macOS will block it on first launch. You need to do one of these:
Parrote.app → select Open → click Open in the dialog.xattr -cr /Applications/Parrote.appYou only need to do this once. After that, it opens normally.
The onboarding flow will guide you through granting Accessibility (for hotkey detection) and Microphone (for recording) permissions. Then you're all set — hold Right Option and speak!
Parrote works out of the box with raw Whisper transcriptions. But if you want cleaner results — better grammar, punctuation, and formatting — install Ollama and pull a model. Parrote will automatically use it to improve transcriptions.
ollama serve
ollama pull gemma3:12bYou can toggle this on/off in Settings → LLM → "Skip text processing".
Contributions welcome! View the source on GitHub →