Confession: Reed started as a business plan. Mac dictation app, nice onboarding, subscription, the works. I had a landing page. I had a pricing page. I even had a payment provider picked out. Then I looked at the market and counted roughly a thousand other dictation apps, and realized I was building the thousand-and-first. So I had two options: park it in a folder and let it slowly rot, or rip out the billing code and give it away. I chose the second, and honestly it's been more fun. What it does: hold a shortcut, talk, release, and clean text appears at your cursor in any app. Everything runs on your Mac: Speech recognition: NVIDIA's Parakeet v3, on the Neural Engine. Cleanup: it drops the "um"s, turns "seven, sorry, five" into "5:00", and writes numbers and dates properly. It uses Apple's on-device model where available and a rules-based pass otherwise. Every edit is checked word by word against what you said, so the model can tidy you up but not rewrite you. No network on the dictation path. The app blocks it in code, and you can verify that with Little Snitch. The internet is only used to download the speech model once and to check for updates. No account, no analytics, no crash reporting. The leftovers from the business era: the code is unusually well tested for a side project, because I was planning to charge people for it. You get the benefit. Will it go paid again? No plans to, and it doesn't matter: it's Apache 2.0, so the released code is yours either way. Fork it if I ever lose my mind. Honest limits: macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon only, English only, and text appears when you let go, not while you talk. Contributions: bug reports and ideas are very welcome. For now I implement the changes myself, so unsolicited PRs get closed (CONTRIBUTING.md explains why). Repo: https://github.com/w20labs/reed · Download: https://reed.w20.ai Feedback welcome, if you are using a similar feature and it is missing a feature please let me know, I will build it if there is a demand.   submitted by   /u/aram-antonyan-hgtg42 [link]   [comments]