Free, private voice dictation for Mac and Windows.
No subscriptions, credits, or usage limits.
Open Memo lets you speak naturally and write anywhere on your computer. Hold Fn on Mac or Right Ctrl on Windows, speak, and release. Your words appear wherever your cursor is. You can change the shortcut in Settings.
Dictation runs locally, works without an internet connection, and never consumes credits or hits a weekly word limit. Your voice is not sent to a cloud transcription service.
- It works anywhere you can type. Use it for messages, email, notes, and documents.
- It makes speech readable. Punctuation and capitalization are added automatically.
- It stays on your computer. Your voice is transcribed locally, not sent to the cloud.
Your recent dictations stay in a simple history so you can find and reuse them. Saving the original audio is optional and off by default.
Mac: Download for Mac,
open the .dmg, and drag Memo into Applications. Open Memo, allow the
requested permissions, then hold Fn and start talking.
Open Memo requires macOS 15 or newer and an Apple silicon Mac. Conomo is included and ready to use. It streams audio to a separate local runtime and applies your vocabulary hints during recognition. The verified model ships inside the installer; no first-launch model download is needed.
Windows unsigned preview: Download for Windows, run the installer, and complete the microphone test. Hold Right Ctrl to dictate. This preview is unsigned, so Windows may display an unknown publisher or SmartScreen warning. See the preview release notes and checksums. Windows 11 x64 with an x86-64-v3 processor (AVX2, FMA, F16C and BMI2) is supported. Nemotron streaming, punctuation and capitalization, and Whisper Base fallback are included; no separate Python, model, GPU driver, or developer-tool installation is needed. Dictation currently supports English.
The optional Cleaned writing mode is currently available on Mac only. Windows includes automatic punctuation and capitalization in As spoken mode. Windows updates use the download button; automatic Windows updates are not enabled yet.
Speech is transcribed on your computer. Open Memo does not require an account and does not send your dictation to a transcription service.
Memo needs microphone access to hear you. On Mac, Accessibility access inserts text and Input Monitoring detects the hotkey. Bluetooth is only used if you connect a Memo microphone or recorder.
Open Memo is open source under the MIT License.
git clone https://github.com/oliverbhull/open-memo.git
cd open-memo
npm ci
npm run checkSee the development guide for prerequisites, local runtime setup, validation commands, and packaging boundaries. Clean mode uses the local 6-bit LFM candidate in development and the same verified offline bundle in production packages; As spoken mode uses the punctuation pipeline. See the Windows build and release guide for the independent Windows installer, release gates, and platform boundaries.
See the repository map for maintained source and historical experiments, and the production audit for release gaps.