Native macOS dictation
Halopen turns your voice into text in any app on your Mac. Hold the function key, talk, release. The text lands at your cursor.
Free for 14 days · macOS 14.0+ · Apple Silicon & Intel
Hold fn · Speak · Release
~5 MB
memory at idle
< 1%
CPU at idle
0
audio retained
~250 ms
to text after release
The shape of it
Most dictation tools optimize for novelty. Halopen optimizes for the way the keyboard already feels under your hands — and joins it.
Hold fn, speak, release. The exact tempo of the keyboard you already use. No floating windows, no toolbars, no “Open Halopen”.
Place names, proper nouns, technical terms, code identifiers — Halopen handles them out of the box. No training, no per-app dictionaries, no rituals.
Built in Swift. Lives in the menu bar. Idles at a few megabytes. Wakes the moment you press the key. Goes back to sleep when you let go.
Live preview
Words appear above the recording pill as you speak — on-device, so you can read what was heard before letting go. The transcription that lands at your cursor is more accurate; the caption is your conversation with the machine.
Long form
Hold the key for a sentence, or for an hour. Halopen stitches the segments together so a lecture, a meeting, or a draft becomes one piece of text.
Anywhere a cursor goes
Text injects directly at the cursor — not a clipboard, not a notification. Works in every native and web app on macOS.
Privacy
Audio is converted to text and discarded. No retention, no training. Privacy details.
Quiet by design
Halopen lives in the menu bar by design. No popover begging for attention, no second window.
Made on the Mac
Halopen is written for macOS, not adapted to it. The menu bar, the audio stack, the accessibility tree — first-party APIs, used the way Apple intended.
~5 MB
memory at idle
< 1%
CPU at idle
~250 ms
to text
0
audio retained
Pricing
Use Halopen free for 14 days. Then $15 a month or $144 a year — $36 less than paying monthly.
Common questions
Yes — every native and web app on macOS where you can place a cursor. Mail, Messages, Notes, Terminal, browsers, code editors, document editors, chat clients, design tools.
A short clip is sent to a transcription service while you hold the key, returned as text, then immediately discarded. No audio is stored. No transcripts are retained on the server.
fn (the function key, default), Right Option, or Control + Option. The first two work on Apple keyboards; Control + Option is the universal fallback for third-party keyboards.
Good enough that proper nouns, technical terms, and place names land correctly without configuration. Punctuation follows your intonation. Filler words are quietly removed.
A few megabytes of memory while idle, near zero CPU. It only does work while you are holding the key.
Not yet. Halopen is built for the Mac with first-party APIs that have no Windows equivalent. A Windows version would be a separate product, not a port.