What is Fluister

Fluister is a local-first voice dictation app for macOS. Hold Right-Option, speak, release. The text appears wherever your cursor is.

It runs on your Mac. No cloud, no account, no telemetry. Transcription uses Whisper on the Apple Silicon GPU. Cleanup runs through a bundled local LLM.

"Fluister" is Dutch for "to whisper" (the sound your Mac makes when it does the work for you).

Built for: people who write a lot, hate typing, and don't want their voice on someone else's servers.

Requires: macOS 11 or later, Apple Silicon (M1 or newer), ~3 GB free disk for the models.

Install

Get Fluister onto your Mac and walk through first launch.

How dictation works

The hotkey, the pipeline, what happens between keypress and paste.

MCP server

Expose Fluister's data to AI clients (Claude, Cursor, Zed).

Privacy

What stays on your Mac. What leaves. What never leaves.

Download

Latest signed build:

curl -fsSL https://fluister.app/install.sh | sh

Or grab Fluister_aarch64.dmg from the latest release.