Parrot

Local dictation for the macOS menu bar. Say "Oy" or tap Option, speak, and Parrot turns your speech into text on this Mac and pastes it into the field you're typing in. parrot.ramihmd.com

What you get

• Say the wake word. Turn on Listen for "Oy" in the popover and pick a microphone. Start a sentence with "Oy" and Parrot types the rest when you pause for a second. Only the start of a sentence counts, so mentioning a parrot mid-sentence doesn't trigger it. "Parrot" also works, or pick your own word.

• Tap Option to start and stop. A short sound plays and a red dot appears on the parrot in the menu bar while Parrot listens. A hollow dot means it's writing the text down. Option-shortcuts and Option-clicks still work, because only a quick tap of Option on its own counts.

• Paste where you are. Parrot copies the text, presses Command-V for you, then puts your clipboard back. Clipboard managers skip the dictation.

• History. Every dictation, searchable, with the model used, recording length, and how long the text took.

• Local models, your pick. Parakeet Ultra by default. Switch in the popover.

• Cleanup. A small on-device model fixes punctuation and capitals and drops um and uh. Pick one under Cleanup, or Off:

  • S1-mini by Superwhisper, the default (Qwen3 0.6B, Apache 2.0), run with MLX. It also resolves self-corrections ("forty two no sorry forty three" becomes "43") and writes numbers, times, and emails. English. A 630 MB download to ~/Library/Application Support/Parrot/Models on first launch. Dictations skip cleanup until it's ready, then about 0.2 seconds per sentence. Since it drops corrected words, Parrot instead checks it added no words you didn't say. Run it on the model card examples with TEST_RUNNER_PARROT_S1MINI=1 xcodebuild ... test -only-testing:ParrotTests/S1MiniCheck.
  • Apple Intelligence, built into macOS, about a second. If its output strays from your words (it answered a dictated question in testing), Parrot pastes the original.

  History keeps both the cleaned and the original text.

• Vocabulary. Names and jargon Parrot should spell your way, each with how it mishears them. Parakeet engines listen for the terms with FluidAudio's CTC boosting, aliases are swapped in every transcript, and cleanup gets them as spelling hints.

• Call notes. Record in the popover when a call starts. Parrot records your mic as "You" and everything the Mac plays as "Them", transcribes both as the call goes, and writes a summary with decisions and action items when you stop. Only text is kept. Use headphones: on speakers, the mic hears the other side too (Parrot drops obvious echoes).

• Meeting reminders. Turn on in Settings. Two minutes before a Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, Webex, or FaceTime call on your calendar (all calendars, or the one you pick), Parrot sends a notification that stays until you act on it. Join & take notes opens the link and starts recording, Join only just opens the link. A call that reaches your calendar late still gets one, up to 10 minutes after it starts; the popover shows the latest line as it's said. When the call ends, the Calls window opens on its transcript and summary. A call stops itself once its meeting is over and both sides have been quiet for 2 minutes, and any call stops after 15 quiet minutes.

Models

Model	Released	Languages	Notes
Parakeet Ultra (default)	Sep 2026, Moondream	25 European	Parakeet v3 post-trained at full precision. 5.80% vs v3's 6.26% on the Open ASR Leaderboard's 7 English sets.
Phonon-2	Sep 2026, Fermion Research	English	Parakeet v3 retrained to five values per weight. First load compiles for about a minute.
Parakeet Redux	Sep 2026, Moondream	25 European	Ternary Parakeet v3, 178 MB.
Parakeet v3	2025, NVIDIA	25 European	Detects the language.
Parakeet v2	2025, NVIDIA	English
Apple Speech	macOS 26	System language	Built in. No download.

The Parakeet family runs on the Neural Engine through FluidAudio. Models download once to ~/Library/Application Support/FluidAudio/Models. Picking one that isn't downloaded asks first, then the popover shows how far the download and load have come. Settings > Models (Settings in the popover footer, or ⌘,) shows what each takes on disk and deletes the ones you don't use, which also unloads them from memory. The model in use can't be deleted.

Adding a model

All models live in Parrot/Engines/Engine.swift. Write an actor that conforms to TranscriptionEngine (prepare() and transcribe(_:) on 16 kHz mono samples), then add a case to EngineID with a name, a description, and make(). The popover picker, Compare Models, and the eval test all read from EngineID.allCases.

For another FluidAudio model, the engine already exists: add a case that returns ParakeetEngine(version: .theNewVersion).

Comparing models

One recording. In History, right-click a dictation and choose Compare Models…. Parrot runs the saved recording through every model, one at a time. It shows each transcript, the time it took, and how far it differs from the original transcript.

An eval set. Right-click a dictation and choose Add to Eval Set. That copies the recording and its transcript to ~/Library/Application Support/Parrot/Eval. Open the .txt and fix any wrong words, so it holds what you actually said. Then score every model:

TEST_RUNNER_PARROT_EVAL=1 xcodebuild -project Parrot.xcodeproj -scheme Parrot -destination 'platform=macOS' test -only-testing:ParrotTests/EngineEval

Add TEST_RUNNER_PARROT_ENGINES=parakeetV2,phonon2 to score only some models. The report prints a WER, load time, transcription time, and speed per model, followed by every clip each model got wrong. It also lands in $TMPDIR/ParrotEval/report.md. WER ignores case and punctuation but not number formatting, so "12%" against "twelve percent" counts as errors.

Parrot keeps recordings for the latest 300 dictations, in ~/Library/Application Support/Parrot/Clips.

Permissions

• Microphone, asked for the first time you dictate.
• System Audio Recording Only, asked for the first time you record a call. If it's denied, the "Them" side stays silent. Change it in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Screen & System Audio Recording.
• Calendars and Notifications, asked when you turn on meeting reminders. Parrot only reads events.
• Accessibility, to see the Option key in other apps and to press Command-V. Without it, Parrot only hears Option while its own popover is open, and it copies instead of pasting.

Debug and Release builds are both signed with the HMDFV Inc. Developer ID, so the grants survive rebuilds.

Build

Requirements: macOS 26 or later, Xcode 26 or later, and XcodeGen.

xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -project Parrot.xcodeproj -scheme Parrot -destination 'platform=macOS' test
open Parrot.xcodeproj   # then Run

Parrot isn't sandboxed, because it presses Command-V in other apps. That means it can't ship on the Mac App Store.

The app icon is drawn in code. Edit scripts/render-icon.swift and run swift scripts/render-icon.swift from the repo root.

Updates and releases

Same as Pacer. The app checks https://parrot.ramihmd.com/appcast.xml with Sparkle, using the same signing key as Pacer and Redpen. scripts/make-dmg.sh builds a signed disk image. scripts/release.sh "notes" notarizes it, publishes the GitHub release to HMDRAMS-DEV/parrot, adds it to site/appcast.xml, and deploys the site.

License

MIT