Mac dictation, verbatim by default

Mac dictation.
Your words, across your apps.

Hold a key, speak, and put your thoughts into Cursor, your terminal, notes, or email. Halopen keeps rewriting optional, so you choose when to polish.

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No credit card · macOS 14.0+ · Then $19/mo or $179/yr

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A 14-inch MacBook on a warm wood desk at night. The macOS menu bar shows the Halopen recording pill mid-recording — the chromatic cyan-to-magenta gradient at peak chroma, with a 0:04 timer. On screen, a sentence is landing as it is spoken: "Ship the revised draft tonight, but hold the pricing section until legal signs off." A warm desk lamp lights the scene from the right; a coffee mug is in the foreground. — Halopen's recording pill on the Mac menu bar mid-dictation. The gradient cyan-to-periwinkle-to-magenta is the brand identity at peak legibility — the visible signal that the function key is held and the words are about to land at the cursor.

On a phone?

Halopen is a Mac app.

Which makes this the wrong device to install it on. Give us an address and the download link will be waiting on your Mac.

One email with the link. Nothing else unless you ask.

A prompt with the details included

Keep the constraint in the prompt.

Two illustrative drafts of a coding request: a short version and one with a file reference and an explicit constraint. Read the details before submitting a prompt, whichever way you enter it.

Typed

40 wpm

0.0s

Spoken

127 wpm

0.0s

The highlighted clause tells the agent which part of the project to leave alone. Check that constraints like this survive recognition and editing.

Illustrative animation, not a recorded Halopen session. The examples use assumed input rates of 40 and 127 words per minute. Displayed times are arithmetic for these drafts; they exclude recognition, correction and agent-response time and do not establish a productivity improvement.

Verbatim by default

Halopen captures what you said.

Keep Verbatim as your starting point. Choose optional cleanup when the draft calls for it, and review recognition errors before sending.

The aim is to preserve your voice. Transcription can still mishear a word, omit a detail or change punctuation. Check the finished draft; use Polish when you want an additional cleanup pass.

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

Illustrative wording example, not a verified recording. Review the completed transcript for identifiers and meaning; choose whether to edit it before sending.

Read the manifesto — the small idea behind a careful tool.

Native

Swift menu-bar app
< 1%

CPU at idle
0

audio retained by Halopen
~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. Ready from your configured hotkey. 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.

Your Mac writing workflow

Mail. Notes. Terminal.

Text injects directly at the cursor — not a clipboard, not a notification. Designed for Mac text fields; test your intended app. Password managers are excluded by design.

Privacy

Choose where speech is processed.

Cloud mode sends audio to a transcription service. On-device recognition uses a downloaded model on Apple Silicon. Local history, optional text context, account checks and diagnostics have separate settings and retention behavior. 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. Recovery does not automatically reinsert the text. Review the saved draft before retrying. 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.

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.

Dictate without limits · $19/mo Save $49 · Annual at $179/yr

Or try Halopen free — 14 days, no card.

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?

Cloud recognition sends audio to a transcription service. On-device recognition processes speech locally on Apple Silicon after a model download. Account checks, updates, diagnostics and your destination app have separate behavior. Read the privacy page for context and retention details.

Does it work in every app?

Halopen is designed for Mac text fields, but permissions, secure fields, custom widgets and remote sessions can affect insertion. Test your exact app with a harmless sentence before relying on it.

How accurate is it?

Try your own vocabulary, names and numbers, then review the inserted text. Accuracy depends on your speech, microphone, recognition mode and recording conditions. This page does not establish a benchmark or a universal accuracy result.

We would rather be verified than believed.

Halopen is young and independent, so it has no wall of testimonials to show you. What it has instead is claims you can falsify from your own machine in about a minute — starting with signing and architecture. These commands do not establish recognition accuracy, network behavior or successful text delivery.

It is signed and notarized by Apple.

Not a self-signed binary you have to right-click past.

$ spctl -a -vvv /Applications/Halopen.app accepted source=Notarized Developer ID
It is native Swift, not a browser in a costume.

One universal binary. No helper processes, no bundled Chromium.

$ file /Applications/Halopen.app/Contents/MacOS/Halopen Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures [x86_64] [arm64]
Two frameworks ship with it. You can list them.

This command lists embedded frameworks, including Sparkle for updates and Sentry for diagnostics. It does not list every dependency or network service.

$ ls /Applications/Halopen.app/Contents/Frameworks Sentry.framework Sparkle.framework
On-device speech recognition runs on your Mac.

On-device recognition runs on your Mac after the model is downloaded. A local dictation entry identifies that route. The audit log stores transcripts and supported app events; it is not a complete network monitor. Account, licensing, updates and enabled diagnostics remain separate. Read the privacy details for the boundaries.

And the limits

macOS only; a Windows version is in development and is not something you can download today. Vocabulary biasing works in cloud mode and not yet in on-device mode. A single hold runs up to ten minutes. It cannot type into a field with macOS Secure Input active — password fields, and Xcode switches it on intermittently — because the OS blocks synthetic keystrokes there for every app on the platform; Halopen can report the app holding Secure Input. Check recovery if text did not arrive. It is a young app, built by one person, and the trial is fourteen days precisely so you can find its edges before you pay for it.

The cursor is waiting.

Pro is unlimited at $19/mo or $179/yr. Or start free — 14 days, no card.

Dictate without limits · $19/mo Try free for 14 days

Apple Developer ID signed · Apple-notarized · macOS 14.0+

Mac dictation. Your words, across your apps.