Verbatim. Yours.

We started with a small belief: a dictation tool should write down what you said. Not a polished version of what you said. Not what an editor thinks you should have said. What you said. Faithfully.

That sounds simple, and it is. The harder part was deciding it on purpose.

The default is verbatim

Halopen is built around an idea so plain it’s easy to miss: when a person speaks, they’re using a register. Contractions. Slang. Intensifiers. The rhythm of their sentences. The Spanish word in the middle of an English thought. Halopen captures all of it — the whole shape of how the sentence was actually said.

You can polish faithful text. You cannot recover register from polish.

That’s the foundation. We pour a lot of careful engineering into getting that right: a transcription model that handles disfluencies natively, a live partial preview that lets you see what was heard before you let go, a system-wide hotkey that hands the words to whatever app your cursor was in. Hold the function key, talk, release. The text appears wherever you were typing.

We did this because faithful capture is the only foundation that compounds. You can always polish faithful text. You can’t recover register from text that’s already been smoothed.

Polish is yours to choose

Some words don’t want to be sent verbatim. A meeting note, an email draft, a paragraph for a press release — sometimes you want a clean editorial pass on top of what you said. Halopen has three modes: Verbatim, Polish, Editorial. Verbatim is the default. Polish and Editorial run only when you choose them. Always your call, always explicit.

Until you choose otherwise, every dictation is verbatim. Which means the words at your cursor sound like you. The product is the choice; verbatim is the foundation.

Why I built it

I dictate most of what I write: prompts to Claude Code, messages, notes, email. The dictation app I used before would at times “correct” my spelling or “improve” what I said, and sometimes that changed the point I was making. I had already built voice-to-text into my iOS app, Composed, and while working on it I noticed it didn’t do that. It wrote what I said. So I built Halopen to bring that to every app on my Mac.

Who Halopen is for

People who talk to their tools. A prompt to Claude Code or Cursor is an instruction, and a tidied instruction is a different instruction, so it has to arrive as you said it. The same holds for the message, the note and the email: words you would sign, exactly as you said them — and the choice, when you want it, to refine.

A word about the product

Halopen is a small native macOS app. Hold the function key, talk, release. Text insertion is designed for compatible Mac fields; check that your draft arrived. There is no Dock icon, no second window, no notification stream — only a small recording pill that floats above the bottom of your screen while you speak, with a live partial transcript above it in Cloud mode so you can see what was heard before you let go.

Halopen is built natively for the Mac. Swift, AppKit, AVAudioEngine — first-party APIs, used the way Apple intended. Quiet, fast, designed to disappear after the words land.

— Jesse Meria, who makes Halopen.