localvoxtral

localvoxtral

Talk to your coding agents. Keep every word on your Mac.
Realtime, fully local dictation for the menu bar. Press a key and speak — your words appear while you're still talking.

   

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/81a341ff-0c53-4fcf-9b7f-ef148b24dfae

Unlike tools that transcribe after you stop speaking, localvoxtral streams text as the audio arrives, powered by Mistral AI's Voxtral Mini 4B Realtime running on your own Apple Silicon. It is built first for prompting coding agents by voice, and it stays a solid general dictation app everywhere else. Everything runs on-device — no account, no subscription, nothing leaving your Mac (see Privacy).

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/T0mSIlver/localvoxtral/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Or download the latest .dmg from Releases.

On first launch, a setup wizard walks you through the microphone and Accessibility permissions and downloads the local engine with live progress. Dictate the moment it finishes. You can re-run the wizard any time from Settings.

[!NOTE] Requirements: an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 15 or later.

[!IMPORTANT] Releases are ad-hoc signed, not notarized yet (see Roadmap). The installer script handles Gatekeeper for you. If you install the DMG by hand and macOS blocks or stalls the first launch ("damaged", Open Anyway, or a hang on macOS 26), clear the quarantine flag:

xattr -cr /Applications/localvoxtral.app

Features

• Built for coding agents — terminals are first-class targets and polishing understands developer speech (details)
• One-key dictation — a single modifier key (Fn/Globe, Right Command, or Right Option) drives both modes, or use classic per-mode keyboard shortcuts (details)
• Two output modes — Overlay Buffer (review, then commit on stop) or Live Auto-Paste (words land in the focused app while you speak)
• Automatic cleanup — an exact-match replacement dictionary in both output modes, plus optional LLM polishing with editable prompts when an Overlay Buffer dictation commits
• Bring your own server — dictation and polishing can each point at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint instead of the built-in local engines
• Menu bar native — instant popover with dictation status at a glance, microphone picker, auto-copy of the final text, and the raw transcript one click away after a polished commit

[!TIP] If localvoxtral is useful to you, a ⭐ on this repo helps others find it.

Privacy

In the default Managed local mode, nothing you say or write is sent anywhere. Audio capture, transcription, and LLM polishing all run as local processes on your Mac, and the only network traffic is the one-time engine and model download. There is no telemetry, no account, and no cloud fallback. The context-aware polishing features (repo vocabulary, clipboard context) are opt-in and only ever talk to a loopback polishing endpoint, never a remote server. If you point localvoxtral at your own External URL server instead, your data goes only where you send it.

Shortcuts

Two ways to trigger dictation, configured in Settings → Dictation:

Single modifier key — Fn/Globe, Right Command, or Right Option. One key, two gestures:

Gesture	Behavior
Tap	Toggle Overlay Buffer dictation on/off
Hold (past the hold delay, default 350 ms)	Live Auto-Paste push-to-talk — dictates while held, stops on release

The gesture selects the output mode, so both workflows are always one key away. A tap commits through optional LLM polishing, while a hold streams words in real time (the replacement dictionary applies in both). Pressing any other key while the modifier is down cancels the gesture, so regular keyboard combos involving the modifier are unaffected. Requires Accessibility permission.

Per-mode keyboard shortcuts — separate shortcuts for Overlay Buffer and Live Auto-Paste; behavior follows the Toggle / Push to Talk setting.

Escape cancels an in-progress dictation.