Kōrero
Free
Speak, and your Mac writes it down.
Hold a key, talk, let go. Kōrero turns your voice into text in any app — entirely on your Mac, entirely free.
Holding the dictation key — release to finish
Kōrero
Free
Hold a key, talk, let go. Kōrero turns your voice into text in any app — entirely on your Mac, entirely free.
He koha — a gift
Kōrero is free because I made it for people I care about, and it seemed wrong to stop there.
I believe AI should quietly make ordinary life easier — writing the email, capturing the idea before it escapes, keeping up with a fast conversation. That shouldn't cost a subscription, and it shouldn't cost your privacy either. So this is my koha: take it, use it, pass it on.
— Andre Linton, Aotearoa New Zealand
How it works
Anywhere your cursor blinks — an email, a doc, a chat box. A small recorder appears.
Talk naturally. Transcription runs on the Neural Engine, so it keeps up with you.
Your words are typed right where you were. That's the whole trick.
What's inside
Speech recognition runs on your Mac — Parakeet on the Neural Engine or Whisper. Turn Wi-Fi off; it still works. Cloud models exist as an option, never a default.
Mail, Notes, Slack, browsers, code editors — if you can type there, you can speak there. Modes tune behaviour per app or website.
Drop in a meeting recording, an interview, a voice memo. Kōrero can tell the voices apart and label who said what.
A personal dictionary and instant word replacements teach it the names, brands, and phrases you actually use — so they come out your way, every time.
Have an AI tidy your rambles into clean prose — using a local model via Ollama if you want to stay fully offline, or your own API keys if not.
Signed, notarized releases that update themselves in one click. Full history and search of everything you've dictated, kept on your Mac.
Privacy
No account to create. No audio uploaded. No analytics watching you. The transcript belongs to the person who spoke it — that's you.
Install
Drag Kōrero into Applications, then open it.
The welcome screen recommends one for your Mac (Parakeet for Apple Silicon). It downloads once — after that, everything runs offline. If it asks about AI providers or API keys, feel free to skip all of that — it's an optional extra, not a requirement.
macOS will ask the first time you record. Click Allow.
So Kōrero can type for you: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility → switch on Kōrero. This is the step people forget — if dictation seems dead, it's this.
That's it. The dictation key is shown on the dashboard, and you can change it in Settings.
Questions
Actually free. No trial, no locked "pro" tier, no account, and your data isn't the product because it never leaves your machine. It's a koha — a gift. That said, if it saves you real time and you feel like it, you're always welcome to shout me a coffee — a thank-you, never a toll.
Nowhere. Recording, transcription, and history all live on your Mac. If you enable an optional cloud model or cloud AI enhancement, only then is that audio or text sent to the provider you chose — and it's always your choice, off by default.
macOS 14.4 or newer. Apple Silicon (M1 or later) is strongly recommended — the local models use the Neural Engine, which is what makes it fast.
Kōrero checks for updates and installs them in one click. Every release is code-signed and notarized with Apple, so what you install is exactly what was built.
It's te reo Māori for talk, speech, conversation — the thing this app is made of. The icon is a koru, the unfurling fern frond: something new opening up.