Halopen — writes what you said

Halopen is a native macOS dictation app. Hold the function key, speak naturally, and the text lands at your cursor exactly as you said it. Verbatim by default. Native Swift. Apple Silicon and Intel. macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later.

The short version of why we built it

Speech is faster than typing. Voice typing is older than the Mac itself. The reason most people don’t use it is that the tools available have a tendency to change what you said. Halopen doesn’t.

When you hold the fn key and say “Bro, we’re not adding queso fresco. One kinda cheese. If we already have cotija, that’s the only goddamn cheese.” — that’s exactly what lands at your cursor. The contraction, the bilingual code-switch, the intensifier, the register. All of it. Nothing sanded. Nothing softened.

Polish and Editorial ship as opt-in modes for the moments you want them — Polish drops fillers without changing your voice; Editorial does a publication-quality pass that still reads like you. Verbatim stays the default — and always will.

What Halopen is

• Native. Swift, AppKit, AVAudioEngine, AXUIElement. Lives in your menu bar. Idles in tens of megabytes of memory and near-zero CPU.
• Hold-to-talk. The fn key by default; Right Option, Control + Option, or a custom hotkey if you’d rather. Press and hold while you speak; release when you’re done.
• System-wide. Works in any app where a cursor goes — Mail, Messages, Notes, Slack, Notion, Cursor, VS Code, Xcode, Terminal, Safari, Chrome, Word, Google Docs, Bear, Obsidian. Anywhere you can type, you can speak.
• Verbatim. What you said is what arrives. No cleanup pass. No tone-matching. The speaker is the author.
• Private. Halopen never captures your screen. Audio leaves your Mac only when you’re holding the key, and only for the seconds you’re holding it. Every cloud call appears in a local audit log you can read yourself.

Who Halopen is for

People who care about how their words land. Writers drafting first-pass prose. Developers dictating into Cursor and Terminal. Researchers capturing footnotes mid-thought. Lawyers and clinicians who need their dictation to be precise. Anyone whose hands need a break from typing.

If voice typing has frustrated you in the past — if a previous tool made you sound corporate, or sanded the edges off your voice, or felt slow, or watched too much of your screen — Halopen is the calm answer.

Try it

Halopen Free is 8,000 words a month, forever. No credit card to download. The day you hit the ceiling is the day you’ll know it’s worth paying for. Pro is $19/mo or $179/yr — unlimited words, all features.

Download Halopen, hold the fn key, and listen for what you sound like.