Tellaflow is out. You can download it. It's free. It runs on your Mac. Your audio never leaves your device. Here's why we built it.
The origin
It started on a plane. No WiFi. Long flight. A voice dictation tool that had one thing to say when we opened it: "Internet connection required."
We'd been using voice dictation tools for years. Whisper had been out since 2022, and we knew it was good enough to run locally. Apple Silicon had the Neural Engine for it. The math worked. What didn't exist was a tool that put those two facts together and made something free, offline, and trustworthy.
So we built one.
What v0.1 does
- Voice-to-text in any Mac application via a configurable hotkey
- OpenAI Whisper (tiny, base, small, medium, large) running on-device
- Live translation from 65 languages to English
- No internet required, ever
- No account, no API key, no subscription
- Completely free
What v0.1 doesn't do (yet)
- Intel Mac support. We're Apple Silicon only for now. The Neural Engine is central to making on-device inference fast enough to be practical. Intel support is on the roadmap.
- Custom vocabulary. For names, technical terms, and jargon, Whisper sometimes needs a nudge. We have ideas here for future versions.
- Auto-punctuation control. Right now Whisper handles punctuation. More granular control is coming.
Why it's free
We don't have server costs for your audio. The AI inference happens on your hardware. That means we genuinely can offer this for free without running a charity the math just works differently than cloud tools. There's no server bill to offset with subscriptions.
We'll keep it free. That's not a launch promotion. It's the business model.
What's next
The roadmap is public. We're working on NVIDIA Parakeet support (already shipping see the Parakeet post), better onboarding for model selection, and a few UX improvements based on early feedback.
If you find a bug, have a feature request, or just want to tell us what you're using it for, the GitHub issues are open. We read them.
Thanks for trying it. Now go dictate something.