Dictation that never leaves your Mac.
Hold a key and talk. Cleaned-up text lands wherever your cursor is — filler gone, punctuation right, your phrasing intact. Tap another key to hear anything read back. Hold a third on a selection to fix, shorten or explain it, or with nothing selected to drop a to-do into Reminders. All of it runs on your Mac, and none of it goes anywhere else.
Free · macOS 26 · Apple Silicon · Notarized by Apple · Source on GitHub
So I was thinking that we should ship it on Friday.
The wedge
Most private dictation apps ask you to trust them.
Timbre makes a claim you can falsify in thirty seconds: out of the box, it makes no network requests at all. Not telemetry, not crash reports. Point Little Snitch at it and watch nothing happen. Turn on update checks and it makes exactly one, to this website, carrying nothing — every request it is capable of is listed here. There is no cloud tier to fall back to, because there is no cloud. And the source is public, so you do not have to take even that on trust.
$ nettop -p Timbre bytes_in bytes_out Timbre.1428 0 0 $ ▍
Update checks off. The list stays empty for as long as you like.
How it works
Three keys. No window, no dock icon, no tour.
Timbre is a menu bar icon and a small pill that appears near your cursor. Everything it does starts with one of the modifier keys already under your thumbs.
Hold, talk, release. It writes.
Apple’s on-device speech model transcribes as you speak; you see the words land in the pill. When you let go, an on-device language model removes the “um”, fixes the punctuation, splits the run-on into sentences — and does not rewrite you into someone else. The result is pasted where your cursor is, in any app.
What you said
so um I was thinking that uh we should probably like ship it on
friday I mean the tests are green
What landed
So I was thinking that we should probably ship it on Friday. The tests are green.
The signing certificate expired on Tuesday, so the release is delayed until Friday. We need to renew it before we can ship anything to customers, and the download page should say so.
Tap, and it reads the selection back.
Select any text — an email, a paragraph you just wrote, a page — and tap. Tap again to speed up, mid-sentence, without losing your place. Hold to stop. It uses the best voice installed on your Mac, and tells you if a better one is a free download away.
Hold on a selection. Say fix, explain, shorten or plain.
Fix corrects spelling, grammar and punctuation and changes nothing else — say nothing at all and that is what you get. Shorten says the same thing in fewer words, in your voice. Plain strips the corporate filler out of machine-sounding text and keeps what it actually says. Explain shows what a word, acronym or passage means, in a card, without touching your text.
It never guesses: a word it does not recognise does nothing. It never destroys: if the model cannot do the job safely, your text is left exactly as it was, and links, mentions, dates and numbers come back untouched either way. A change is an ordinary paste, so ⌘Z puts it back.
Can you take a look at the timber kit tests before the ADR review?
- Call the dentist Thursday
- Renew the signing certificate Friday, 09:00
- Send Sam the release notes Today
Say a to-do. It lands in Reminders.
Hold the same key with nothing selected and say it — “call the dentist Thursday”. Timbre reads the date on your Mac and files it in a Timbre list in Apple’s Reminders, so it is on your iPhone and your watch a moment later, synced by Apple, not by us. Tap left Option with nothing selected to hear what is on the list.
Your dictionary
It learns your words. Nobody else does.
A cloud app learns your vocabulary by sending it to a server. Timbre keeps a personal dictionary on your Mac and gets three things from it: the words the cleanup should prefer, the corrections for phrases it keeps mishearing, and the definitions that answer “explain” before any model does.
Vocabulary
Corrections
- timber kit
- TimbreKit
- lang views
- Langfuse
- my email
- hugo@example.com
Definitions
- ADR
- Architecture Decision Record
- TCC
- Transparency, Consent and Control — the macOS permission system
Compared
Side by side, from their own pages.
| Timbre | macOS Dictation | Wispr Flow | Tidy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dictate into any app | — | |||
| Cleans up filler and punctuation | on-device | — | in the cloud | — |
| Fixes text you select | — | — | ||
| Shortens or de-slops a selection | — | — | ||
| Explains a selection, using your own definitions | — | — | — | |
| Reads text aloud | Spoken Content | — | — | |
| To-dos by voice, into Reminders | via Siri | — | — | |
| Learns your words and corrections | partly | — | ||
| Where your voice goes | nowhere | on-device for most languages | their servers | no voice |
| Network requests | none by default | none for on-device languages | its update feed | |
| Account | none | none | required | none |
| Price | free | included | subscription | free |
| Source | open | closed | closed | closed |
From each product's own website, September 2026. If something here is wrong, the source is one click away and a correction is welcome.
Questions
Before you install it.
- Does Timbre send my voice anywhere?
- No. Timbre sends nothing about you anywhere. Out of the box it makes no network requests at all; if you turn on update checks, it fetches one small version file from this website, carrying nothing. Speech recognition, text cleanup, read-aloud and the text commands all run on your Mac using Apple’s on-device models. You can verify this yourself with a network monitor such as Little Snitch.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes, completely. There is no server to reach, so aeroplane mode changes nothing about how Timbre behaves.
- Do I need an account?
- No. There is no sign-up, no login, and no subscription. Download it and hold the key.
- What does it cost?
- Timbre is free for personal use.
- What are the system requirements?
- macOS 26 or later, an Apple Silicon Mac, and Apple Intelligence enabled. Timbre grants itself no special access beyond Microphone and Accessibility, both of which you approve, and Reminders only if you use it for to-dos.
- How is this different from the dictation built into macOS?
- Apple’s dictation transcribes what you say literally. Timbre adds a cleanup pass with an on-device language model: it removes filler words, fixes punctuation, and keeps your phrasing. It also reads selected text back to you, it can fix, shorten, explain or plain-speak text you select, and it turns a spoken sentence into a Reminder.
- Can it fix text I have already written?
- Yes. Select the text, hold right Command and say “fix” — or say nothing, because a silent hold means fix. Say “shorten” to tighten it, “plain” to strip corporate filler and keep what it actually says, or “explain” to have it explained in a small card. Links, mentions, dates and numbers come back untouched. A word Timbre does not recognise does nothing, and Command-Z undoes any change.
- Can it capture to-dos?
- Yes. Hold right Command with nothing selected and say it — “call the dentist Thursday”. It lands in a Timbre list in Apple’s Reminders with the date read on your Mac, so it is on your iPhone and your watch too. Tap left Option with nothing selected to hear the list. You can pick any Reminders list in Settings.
- What about acronyms and jargon it does not know?
- Define them once in Settings under Dictionary. A defined term is explained from your definition, word for word, and every explanation card says whether the answer came from your dictionary or from the on-device model.
- It keeps mishearing a word. Can I teach it?
- Yes. Teach it a correction: what Timbre heard and what you meant. From then on that phrase is replaced before the cleanup step sees it, every time, and the corrected spelling joins your vocabulary.
- Does it work without Apple Intelligence?
- Speech recognition, read-aloud and to-dos do. The cleanup pass and the text commands use Apple’s on-device language model, so without it you get the raw transcript, and fix falls back to macOS’s own spell checker plus the corrections you have taught.
- Why does it need Accessibility permission?
- To watch for the hotkeys while other apps are focused, and to paste the finished text where your cursor is. macOS classes both as Accessibility.
- Does Timbre check for updates?
- Only when you ask. Choose Check for Updates in the menu, or turn on a daily check in Settings; both fetch one small version file from this website and send nothing about you. Installing an update first checks that the download is Timbre, signed by its developer and notarized by Apple.
Try it on your own words.
Free for personal use. Notarized by Apple, so it installs without a fight. Built in the open — every decision is written down.