Hold Right ⌥, talk, release — your words are typed into whatever app you were in. It transcribes whole audio files too. All of it on your Mac, none of it in a cloud.
Buy ⌥AFK — $10 onceOne payment · unlimited dictation & file transcription · one key, 3 Macs
Honestly, you have options. Apple's built-in dictation is free. Wispr Flow raised millions and its AI cleanup is genuinely clever. If you want meeting summaries and a team plan, go there — no hard feelings.
I built ⌥AFK because I wanted one narrow thing done properly: press a key, say the thing, watch it get typed — without my voice taking a round trip through someone else's server, and without another $15-a-month on the pile.
So that's the deal. It dictates. It transcribes audio files — as many as you want. It works in airplane mode. It costs $10, once. It's early and improving, and the people who've bought it are already steering what gets built next.
— Keshav, the one person making this
One key, anywhere in macOS. No window to find, no app to switch to.
Your Mac's own chip does the transcription, fast enough to keep up with you. No server is involved. There's no server to involve.
Release the key and the words are typed into whatever was focused: Mail, Slack, your editor, a terminal.
Drop in a voice memo, a lecture, a 7-hour interview — get the whole thing back as text, with timestamps, .srt subtitles, or .json. Transcription services charge by the minute, forever; an hour of audio runs $10–15 out there, so one long interview costs more than this entire app. With ⌥AFK it's included. Transcribe every day. Nothing meters, nothing uploads.
A cloud dictation app has to send your recording somewhere else. ⌥AFK doesn't. After the one-time model download, turn off Wi-Fi — it still works. (For the curious: it runs NVIDIA's Parakeet model on Apple Silicon. For everyone else: hold a key, talk, your Mac does the typing.)
No sign-up, no login, no telemetry dashboard with your name on it. Buy it, get a key by email, activate, done.
The price rises $5 every 10 sales as the product firms up — the earlier you take a chance on it, the less you pay, forever. The first ten paid $5. This rung is $10. The next is $15.
Dictation as a game: a rank ladder from Bronze to Grandmaster, lifetime words, time saved, WPM, streaks. Typing less is a stat you can climb — and one click turns it into a share card, ready to post.
⌥AFK ships a real CLI, so scripts and AI agents can transcribe too — pipe a meeting straight into your agent of choice:
$ afk transcribe meeting.m4a | claude -p "summarize" $ afk transcribe lecture.mp4 --srt > lecture.srt
| Price | On-device | File transcription | Account required | Agents / CLI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ⌥AFK | $10 once | Yes, always | Unlimited, included | No | Yes |
| Wispr Flow | $15/mo | No — cloud | No | Yes | No |
| Monologue | $20/mo | Cloud by default | No | Yes | No |
| Superwhisper | $8.49/mo or $249 lifetime | Yes (local models) | Yes | Yes | No |
| MacWhisper | €59 once | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Prices as listed on each product's site, July 2026. They're all good tools — ⌥AFK just makes a different trade: everything local, one small payment, and a CLI.
macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, on Apple Silicon (M1 or newer). Intel Macs aren't supported — the speech model runs on the Neural Engine.
Really. First launch downloads a ~1 GB speech model and optimizes it for your Mac — that one-time setup needs an internet connection and about 2 GB of free disk. After that, everything runs fully offline. Your audio is processed on your Mac and is never uploaded.
Two: Microphone (so it can hear you) and Accessibility (so it can type the transcript into the app you're using). That's the entire mechanism — there's nothing else to grant.
You get a license key by email right after purchase. Enter it once in the app to activate — one key works on up to 3 of your Macs.
No. It installs like any normal Mac app — signed and notarized with Apple, so there's no Gatekeeper warning. Updates arrive in-app.
Yes, because there's no meter to run. The model lives on your Mac and transcribing costs me nothing — so it costs you nothing. Dictate all day, transcribe a podcast archive, whatever. There's no plan to upgrade to.
Because it's early, and I'd rather have believers than a launch discount. The price rises $5 every 10 sales as the product firms up — so whatever you pay is the least anyone will ever pay after you.
Fair question for a one-person app. Here's the honest answer: ⌥AFK runs entirely on your Mac, so there's no server that can shut down and take the product with it. What you bought keeps working. Updates are a bonus, not life support.
You've been typing things you could just say.
Ten dollars, once. Yours forever. Never phones home. Next rung: $15.
Buy ⌥AFK — $10 once