One key to dictate anywhere, and nothing leaves the Mac.

Hold a key, speak, let go: the text writes itself wherever the cursor is, in a message, a document or an email. Transcription runs on the Mac's own processor, offline, with no account and no subscription.

From the first file to the shared tool: 1 day
What's left of it today: 94,544 words transcribed, none of them sent to a server
First file: 15 June 2026

Open VoixFlash Free, open source (MIT) · written for myself first, then shared

lun. 12:41

Sans titre

micro plein : prêt

chargement → prêt → enregistre → transcrit → écrit

Hold the button, or the right Option key, then let go.

What the sentence meant

Dictating a message, transcribing a meeting, turning a recording into text: all of it existed already. Provided you paid a subscription per tool, around €20 a month (the going rate on the market, checked in July 2026), opened an account every time, and accepted that the audio would travel to a server. And provided you lived with tools that work every other day.

On 15 June 2026, at the end of the day, I stopped waiting for one of them to get good. The repository was born at 19:25; the first run is from the same evening. At 11:06 the next morning it was public on GitHub, installer and instructions included; the first shared version came out that same evening.

What was built

A tool for myself first. A menu bar application, held in a single file, 5,586 lines as of September 2026, sitting on the native components of macOS. Transcription runs on the Mac's processor; the model downloads once at install time, and everything after that is offline.

Two paths for the same sentence

On the left, what an online service takes for granted. On the right, what VoixFlash does.

The gesture, seen through the icon

The icon has no colour: its shape is what says the state. One dictation goes through four of them.

The text is pasted in one block, never letter by letter: that is what keeps documents intact.

The key is chosen from the menu: right Option by default, or any other, captured on the fly. A very short press dictates nothing.

Meetings and files

LiveStart a meeting
A line in the menu, for as long as you like, 3 h at most as a safeguard. The text appears in a window of the app, editable, copyable, exportable to a dated file. The clipboard is left alone.
A fileImport an audio file…
mp3, m4a, wav, flac, ogg, aiff, or the audio track of an mp4 or mov video. Progress shows in the menu, and can be cancelled without losing the text already obtained. Files of 2 h and more.
Who is speakingSeparate the speakers
“Locuteur 1”, “Locuteur 2”, in a live meeting as well as on an imported file. From 1 to 8 people expected, or free detection. A local add-on of about 50 MB, downloaded once, with no account.
Who is whoName the speakers
In the meeting window, “Locuteur 3” becomes “Marie” everywhere. Giving two speakers the same name merges them, when a single voice has been counted as two.

What daily use added

Proper nounsThe vocabulary
A word written once the way you want to see it, and it comes out right, even when heard in two pieces: “voie flash” becomes “VoixFlash”. The setting that changes the most from one day to the next.
Mid-meetingDrop a marker
The dictation key marks the moment you press it, with a small sound. The markers are listed at the top of the final text, with their time: enough to find one passage in an hour of recording.
Hands fullHands-free
A short press locks the microphone, you speak without holding anything, a second press stops it. Escape cancels at any point, and nothing is written.
When the Mac wakesThe key still responds
macOS cuts keyboard listening off when the Mac sleeps. VoixFlash subscribes again on wake, instead of staying mute until the next restart.

Installing, in one double-click

You double-click the installer. A Terminal window opens, prepares the application's own corner, downloads the model once, and registers it to start with the session. Nothing is placed in the system: it all lives in one folder of the user's library, and a second double-click removes the lot.

Ce que Terminal affiche

install.command

===================================================================
   Installation de VoixFlash
===================================================================

• Code copié dans : ~/Library/Application Support/VoixFlash
• Création de l'environnement isolé (téléchargé si nécessaire)…
• Installation des bibliothèques (transcription, audio, clavier)…
• Téléchargement du modèle de transcription (une seule fois).
   [/] Téléchargement en cours… (plusieurs minutes, c'est normal)
  ✓ Modèle prêt : la transcription marche hors-ligne.
• Configuration du démarrage automatique…
• Vérification du démarrage de l'application…

===================================================================
   Installation terminée : l'application tourne.
===================================================================

“Everything is local. After installation, no audio and no text leaves the Mac. No account, no telemetry.”

What VoixFlash does not do

It only runs on an Apple Silicon Mac, and it is not signed: macOS warns on first launch.
It does not use the graphics card: everything goes through the processor. At small quality, an hour of audio takes about fifteen minutes; medium is markedly slower.
A dictation and a meeting each have their maximum length, and only one transcription runs at a time.
Speaker separation degrades when several people talk at the same time, and on an imported file it adds about a quarter of its length to the processing.
The vocabulary corrects the words it has been taught, not the ones it has never seen.
Files protected against copying, bought from the Apple Music Store for instance, are refused.

The result

“Another tool that asks you to pay” became: 94,544 words transcribed on this Mac since 26 June 2026, dictations and meetings together, without a single one leaving the machine. An 8 GB M2 Mac, zero subscriptions.