see.computer

Ultra-fast, local-first dictation and instant video links for the Mac. Free and open source (MIT). Website at see.computer.

The same dictation engine also runs as a keyboard on iPhone. See ios/README.md.

Install

Download the DMG from the latest release, drag see.computer into Applications, and open it. It needs macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon.

The app lives in the menu bar. On first launch it downloads the 670 MB speech model, and the pill at the bottom of the screen shows the percentage. macOS then asks for permissions, each the first time the feature that needs it runs. Microphone and Input Monitoring make hold-to-talk work. Accessibility lets the app paste for you. Screen Recording is only asked for the first time you hold the trigger with Shift. The tray menu has a shortcut to each pane, and the Permissions section below says what each one is for.

Then click into any text field, hold the Globe key, say something, and let go.

If you would rather build it yourself, see Build and run.

Three gestures. That is the whole interface.

Gesture	What happens
Hold Globe (Fn), speak, release	The spoken text is pasted at your cursor, in any app. Plain dictation stays local.
Double-tap Globe	Locks dictation open with nothing held. Tap Globe once to stop and paste. Esc cancels.
Hold Globe, double-tap Shift, release both	Locks screen recording and narration. Tap Globe once to stop and paste. Esc cancels.
Hold Globe+Shift, release to stop	Records the screen and microphone while held. On release, the recording is packaged into an agent-readable take folder. The paste contains the narration in quotes, a blank line, then a tail naming the captures and the path to take.md. Releasing before about 0.6 seconds discards the recording.

The Globe key is the default. Hold it to dictate, or double-tap it to lock dictation open, shown with a blue ring. While holding it, tap Shift for a screenshot, hold Shift for a video clip, or double-tap Shift to lock video and narration. A single screenshot waits up to 300 ms for a possible second tap. After video locks, release both keys and use the computer normally. Tap the trigger once to stop, or press Esc to cancel. The pill shows a red ring while video is locked.

macOS can claim the same Globe taps. If Dictation is on with its "Press 🌐 twice" shortcut, or "Press 🌐 key to" is set to anything but "Do nothing", the tray shows a warning that opens the Keyboard settings. The app never changes system shortcuts itself. Choose Left Option or Right Option in the tray to use a different trigger; every trigger has the same gestures. Right Option is AltGr on a Swedish keyboard.

If the keyboard listener is interrupted, the app finishes the current take and rebuilds the listener with fresh gesture state. Controller cancellations, rejected starts, and missed key releases also reset the gesture decoder.

Dictation runs NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6b v3 (INT8, ONNX) on the CPU. On an M3 Max a six-second English sentence comes back in about 200 ms, the median of eight runs of see-computer transcribe on fixtures/en.wav. The model is 670 MB and downloads on first launch into ~/Library/Application Support/see.computer/models/.

Hesitation is dropped before anything is pasted. um, uh and hm go, along with the comma or full stop stuck to them, and the next word takes over the capital letter they were holding. Hedges like like and actually stay, because they are real words far more often than they are filler, and so does er, which is Swedish for "your". A dictation that was nothing but a hum pastes nothing at all.

Numbers are written the way you would read them, not the way they were said. Parakeet makes that choice on its own and gets it right about half the time, so twenty percent came back as words as often as 20%. A grammar over the number words of English and Swedish runs after the filler pass. two hundred and seventy nine becomes 279, twenty-five thousand becomes 25,000, Fable five point one becomes Fable 5.1, tjugo procent becomes 20 %, and two million stays 2 million. The rule is the usual one. Ten and above are digits, and zero to nine stay words unless they carry a percent sign or a decimal point, so one thing and the Swedish article en are left alone. Digits already in the text pass through, and the stray space the model puts in 235 ,000 is closed.

Recordings land in ~/Documents/see.computer/, next to the dictation history. Each <stamp>/ take contains take.md, transcript.json, screenshots under shots/, and numbered clips under clips/. A clip keeps its movie at clips/001/clip.mov and its JPEG frames under clips/001/frames/. The paste puts the narration in quotes, leaves a blank line, then names the screenshots and clips before the take.md path. A human or a web chatbox gets the words even where a local path is dead. An agent that can read files can open the exact frames where each thing was said without decoding the video. If packaging fails or times out, the pill says so and the movie stays in ~/Documents/see.computer/, where the tray panel still lists it and copies its file:// link. The tray panel lists recordings among the recent dictations by their narration, under a video glyph where a dictation carries a waveform, and picking one copies that same text. see-computer clip <mov> moves an existing recording into a new take folder and prints its take.md path.

Optional sharing beta

In version 0.1.1, turn on Make recordings shareable in Settings. It applies to new takes. Video chunks and locally compressed screenshots upload while you record. Transcription still runs on your Mac. Plain dictation does not create a share.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗