A native macOS menu-bar app for dictation. Hold or tap fn+Space, speak, and Dimmela pastes the text where you are typing. Speech is transcribed on your Mac by Parakeet v3 on the Neural Engine. Optionally, an LLM rewrites each Dictation with your own prompts and skills.
It is a lighter alternative to Handy: with the speech model loaded the app uses about 60 MB of memory, against Handy's 900 MB (the model's weights live with the Neural Engine and are not counted there; even counting them it stays well under half).
brew install --cask mameli/dimmela/dimmela
Or download Dimmela.zip from the latest release, open it and move Dimmela to Applications.
How it works
- Dictation: hold
fn+Space and release when you are done (Hold), or tap it to dictate hands-free until the next tap (Lock). Esc cancels.
- Modes: folders of prompt files or skills (
SKILL.md) become Modes. Every Dictation starts with the Default Mode; while dictating, 1–9 pick another one and shift shows the list. Post-processing goes to any OpenAI-compatible provider, such as OpenRouter, with the reasoning level you choose; whatever else a model needs goes in Extra parameters, a JSON object added to every request as written: the provider's documentation says what to write.
- Vocabulary: names and terms that speech recognition gets wrong are fixed in the Transcript and given to the LLM.
- History: the last five Dictations, with their audio, to copy or Post-process again from the menu. If you turn it on, a Post-processing log keeps much more, text only (Transcript, Mode, model, the LLM's answer; add a
"comment" by hand where the answer was not what you wanted), in ~/.dimmela/post-processing.jsonl: material to improve your prompts with a model of your choice.
The words Dimmela uses are defined in CONTEXT.md, its decisions in docs/adr.
Building
cp Config/Local.xcconfig.example Config/Local.xcconfig
xcodebuild -project Dimmela.xcodeproj -scheme Dimmela -configuration Debug -derivedDataPath build/DerivedData build
Domain tests: cd DimmelaCore && swift test. What needs a Mac is checked by hand with docs/TESTING.md.
Support
Dimmela is free. If it is useful to you, you can buy me a coffee: it helps cover the costs of keeping Dimmela going.
License
MIT
