Typed
40 wpm
0.0s
Mac dictation, verbatim by default
Typing edits you
before you finish thinking.
Halopen is a native macOS dictation app that types exactly what you said, verbatim by default — every word, every file path, every constraint — into Claude Code, Cursor, the terminal, Mail, or any other Mac app. Because speaking costs less effort than typing, spoken instructions keep the qualifying clauses that typed ones lose.
Every extra clause costs effort to type, so you drop it — and it is usually the one that mattered. Spoken, it costs a breath. Hold the function key and Halopen lands exactly what you said at your cursor, in any Mac app. Verbatim. Nothing tidied away.
No credit card · 14 days free · Apple Developer ID signed · macOS 14.0+
- Accurate, and verbatim by default
- Tuned for code & terminal vocab
- No screen capture
- Every cloud call logged
Across 1,014 real dictations, 23% ran past 60 words and 35% carried three or more clauses — prompts nobody types. See the measurements →
Universal
Anywhere a cursor goes.
Mail. Notes. Cursor. Notion. Terminal. Slack. The Mac apps you already live in — voice typing, the same way, in every one.
The prompt you'd have typed
Three times the instruction, and it finishes first.
Same intent, both sides. On the left, what people actually type. On the right, what the same person says out loud — because the fourth clause costs a breath instead of another eleven seconds.
Spoken
127 wpm
0.0s
The highlighted clause is what stops an agent refactoring your audio pipeline at two in the morning. It is also the first thing you leave out when leaving it out saves you eleven seconds.
40 wpm is the standard research baseline for sustained adult typing. 127 wpm is Halopen's own measured median across 795 real dictations of five seconds or longer, taken from the local audit log — not an estimate. Both panels animate at those true relative rates.
Verbatim by default
Halopen captures what you said.
Every contraction, every intensifier, every code-switch — captured carefully. Filler is optional; voice is not.
What lands at your cursor sounds like the person who spoke it. That’s the foundation. Polish, when you want it, is yours to choose.
Halopen output
“Honestly, I’m not sure the rerender’s coming from useCallback — could be the parent passing a fresh prop. Pull React.memo out, see if it actually flattens.”
- · I’m · rerender’s — contractions preserved
- · useCallback · React.memo — code identifiers
- · Honestly — thinking-aloud register
- · actually flattens — intensifier kept
Verbatim from a real Halopen session. The cleanup pass would flatten this into something polished and forgettable. Halopen keeps the speaker; you decide what happens next.
Read the manifesto — the small idea behind a careful tool.
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Native
Swift menu-bar app
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< 1%
CPU at idle
-
0
audio retained
-
~250 ms
to text after release
The shape of it
Three things, done with care.
Most dictation tools optimize for novelty. Halopen optimizes for the way the keyboard already feels under your hands — and joins it.
- 01
A hotkey, not a gesture.
Hold fn, speak, release. The exact tempo of the keyboard you already use. No floating windows, no toolbars, no “Open Halopen”.
- 02
Editorial accuracy.
Place names, proper nouns, technical terms, code identifiers — Halopen handles them out of the box. No training, no per-app dictionaries, no rituals. Punctuation follows your intonation; the rare miss is your voice, not your prose.
- 03
Native, in the Mac sense.
Built in Swift. Lives in the menu bar. Idles in tens of megabytes. Wakes the moment you press the key. Goes back to sleep when you let go.
Live preview
A whisper-light caption.
Words appear above the recording pill as you speak — on-device, so you can read what was heard before letting go. The transcription that lands at your cursor is more accurate; the caption is your conversation with the machine.
Spell a name out loud mid-sentence to correct it — M-E-R-I-A lands as Meria, not as the spelling.
Long form
No word limits.
Hold the key for a sentence or a long thought — up to ten minutes per take. Release between thoughts; the next hold lands at the cursor and continues exactly where the last one stopped.
Anywhere a cursor goes
Mail. Notes. Terminal.
Text injects directly at the cursor — not a clipboard, not a notification. Works in every Mac app that accepts text. Password managers are excluded by design.
Privacy
Transcribed, then forgotten.
Audio leaves your Mac only while you hold the key, comes back as text, and gets discarded. No retention, no training. We bias from cursor-adjacent text only — never the whole window, never a screenshot. Privacy details.
Quiet by design
No Dock icon. No nag.
Halopen lives in the menu bar by design. No popover begging for attention, no second window.
Recovery
The take that didn’t land is still there.
If focus jumps to another app before your text lands, Halopen keeps the transcript. If the network drops mid-transcription, it keeps the audio — replayable from the menu bar when you’re back online. Nothing is auto-inserted, nothing leaves your Mac unless you retry. Recover on your terms, or not at all.
Snippets
Say “sig.” Get your full signature.
Dictate a short trigger — any word you choose — and it expands to the full text before it lands at your cursor. A signature, a standing reply, a block of boilerplate. Set it once in Settings; it fires every time.
Native to the Mac
Swift. AppKit. AVAudioEngine.
Halopen is written for macOS, not adapted to it. The menu bar, the audio stack, the accessibility tree — first-party APIs, used the way Apple intended.
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Swift
native macOS
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AppKit
menu-bar idiom
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Sonoma+
first-party APIs
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Universal
Apple Silicon & Intel
Pricing
Use it free. Pay when it earns its keep.
Halopen is free for 14 days, no credit card. Pro is $19/month or $179/year for unlimited — two weeks of real work is how you find out.
Common questions
Things people ask before they download.
Is the trial really free?
Yes. Halopen is free for 14 days, no credit card. Two weeks of your real work is the honest way to find out whether it's worth paying for.
Does my audio leave the Mac?
Audio is sent to a transcription service only while you hold the key, returned as text, and immediately discarded. Halopen never stores audio or transcripts on our servers.
Does it work in every app?
Almost everywhere a cursor goes — Mail, Messages, Notes, Terminal, browsers, code editors, document editors, chat, design tools. A handful of sandboxed system dialogs are the exception.
How accurate is it?
Among the most accurate dictation engines available. Proper nouns, technical terms, place names, and bilingual code-switching usually land correctly on the first pass. Where they do not, a live preview shows what is about to be typed — you can re-state or spell out a word and the correction lands instead of the misread.
More questions?
60+ answers about Mac voice typingThe cursor is waiting.
Pro is unlimited at $19/mo or $179/yr. Or start free — 14 days, no card.
Apple Developer ID signed · Apple-notarized · macOS 14.0+