OpenRamble

OpenRamble is a free, open-source, local dictation app for Mac. Hold a key, speak and let go, and your words appear as text at the cursor in any app.

OpenRamble's speech-to-text runs offline with Parakeet Ultra, a model built on NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3, so your voice and text never leave your Mac. OpenRamble removes filler words such as "um" and "uh" without rewording you. It also records meetings and your screen and transcribes the audio locally. The code is MIT licensed, and there is no account and no subscription.

Download OpenRamble for Mac

OpenRamble is free and needs macOS 14 or later on an Apple Silicon Mac. Support for Intel Macs is experimental. Each build is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple.

How it works

1. Hold Right Command.
2. Speak.
3. Let go. OpenRamble turns your speech into text on your Mac and pastes it at your cursor.

Double-press the key to dictate hands-free, and press it once more to finish. One dictation, from pressing the key until you let go or finish, is called a take. Press Escape to cancel a take.

Install

1. Download the DMG from the latest release and drag OpenRamble to Applications.
2. Open OpenRamble. It offers to download the speech model, which is about 490 MB, and it starts the download only when you click. It then asks for Microphone and Accessibility access.

OpenRamble is in public beta. It installs an update only after you click.

What OpenRamble does

Dictation in any app

OpenRamble's voice typing works in any app that accepts text, from Mail, Slack and browsers to Cursor, VS Code and the terminal.

• Hold to talk (push-to-talk). The default key is Right Command, and you can choose Fn, Right Option, Right Control, Left Command, Left Option or Left Control instead.
• Hands-free. Double-press the key to dictate without holding it. In Settings, you can also let hands-free dictation finish when you stop talking.
• Long dictation. You can dictate for longer than five minutes, and OpenRamble starts transcribing while you are still speaking.
• Personal dictionary. Tell OpenRamble how a word sounds and how to write it. A built-in list already covers common technical terms. You can also import and export your dictionary as a file.
• Your clipboard comes back. Once the text has been read, usually a quarter of a second after the paste, OpenRamble puts back what was on your clipboard, images included. If no app reads the text within three seconds, OpenRamble puts your clipboard back and keeps your words on screen, where you are working, until you paste them or set them aside. Dictated text is marked so that it stays off Universal Clipboard and out of clipboard managers that respect the standard privacy markers.
• Words wait where you work. If a paste cannot land, the words stay on the dictation panel with the reason and one action. Tap the dictation key to paste them once you are in a text field. A password field or a terminal that protects typing does not stop a paste. If one still goes unread while typing is protected, the tap copies the words instead, and your own ⌘V pastes. Later keeps them in History, and holding the key starts a new dictation.
• Your last takes, one click away. The OpenRamble menu starts with your three newest dictations, as their own words. Click one to paste it into the app in front, or hold Option and click to copy it. ⌃⌘V pastes the newest from any app.
• Three shortcuts that work from any app. ⌃⌘V pastes the last take, ⌃⌘R starts and stops a recording, and ⌃⇧⌘R opens the screen recording choices. You can change or clear each one in Settings → General. The menu prints only these, because they are the ones that work wherever you are.
• Library. One window holds everything you said: your recent dictations and your recordings, by day, with one search. Replay, copy or delete a dictation, or recognize it again.
• VoiceOver. With VoiceOver on, OpenRamble plays a short tone when the microphone opens instead of a spoken announcement, so VoiceOver's speech does not end up in your dictation.

Clean Verbatim removes filler words without rewording you

Clean Verbatim removes filler words such as "uh" and "um", short stutters such as "the the", restarts such as "a, uh, a", and anything you take back with "scratch that". It only deletes words, and it never rewords, reorders or adds one, so OpenRamble never paraphrases you unless you ask. Clean Verbatim is a set of written rules, not an AI model.

You say	OpenRamble types
Um, so the deploy failed, uh, scratch that, the deploy passed.	The deploy passed.
Uh, I need you to um, fix the login bug, um, and then update the readme.	I need you to fix the login bug and then update the readme.
It's a, uh, a leak.	It's a leak.
Мы, э, думаем, что, ээ, надо подождать.	Мы думаем, что надо подождать.
Um 5 Uhr treffen wir uns im Büro.	Um 5 Uhr treffen wir uns im Büro.

The second row is what Parakeet wrote when a Mac voice read the sentence aloud.

• If a word might be one you meant, it stays. In the last row, the German "um" means "at", so OpenRamble keeps it.
• If a take was only a correction, OpenRamble pastes nothing and tells you so. The take stays in History.
• Meeting transcripts drop filler words but keep "scratch that" and one-word replies, because in a meeting those are things a person said.

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