Press a key, speak naturally, and your words appear as text. Transcribed privately, right on your own computer.
Free to start · No account · No cloud
From thought to text in seconds — no mouse, no copy-paste.
Press Fn on a Mac (or Option+M) or Alt+M on Windows, from any app. A sound and the tray icon tell you Chirp is listening.
Just talk normally, in English, for up to 5 minutes. No need to pause between words.
Press the same key again to stop. Chirp transcribes on your computer and deletes the audio.
Usually in under a second. On a Mac it's pasted where your cursor is. On Windows it's on your clipboard, ready for Ctrl+V.
Most people speak at around 130 to 150 words per minute but type at about 40. Chirp helps you capture ideas at the speed of thought.
Every time you dictate into a cloud-based app, your raw thoughts — medical notes, business ideas, private messages, passwords spoken aloud — get sent to servers you don't control. What happens to that data?
Cloud providers get hacked. When they do, your dictated thoughts — unfiltered, unedited — could be exposed to anyone.
Many voice services quietly use your audio to improve their models. Your private dictations become someone else's training data.
Human reviewers at major tech companies have been caught listening to user recordings. Your voice, your words, reviewed by strangers.
Chirp is different. Your voice never leaves your device, and each recording is deleted as soon as it's transcribed. No uploads, no accounts, no analytics. Just you and your words, staying exactly where they belong.
A full history of everything you've spoken — searchable, exportable, and stored entirely on your machine.
Try Chirp free, then unlock unlimited transcriptions for less than a dollar a month.
Get started with 28 free transcriptions
Unlimited transcriptions, all year long
No account needed. The free transcriptions have no time limit.
Straight answers.
Chirp turns speech into text on your own computer using whisper.cpp, an open-source speech recognition engine. Your audio is never uploaded, there is no account to create, and it works in any app through a global shortcut. Cloud dictation tools send your audio to a server to be transcribed.
Not for transcription. Speech is turned into text on your device, so dictation works on a plane or with Wi-Fi off. Chirp checks for app updates when it launches, and once you have a paid license it checks that license about once a day. A licensed copy keeps working for up to 7 days without a successful check.
Yes. Your audio never leaves your computer, and the recording is deleted as soon as it has been transcribed. The text is kept in a local history on your machine so you can search it later, and you can delete any entry. Chirp has no analytics or tracking and no account.
On a Mac, Chirp copies the transcript to your clipboard and pastes it into the app you are using, right where your cursor is. This needs the Accessibility permission. On Windows, the transcript is copied to your clipboard and you press Ctrl+V to paste it; automatic pasting on Windows is not available yet.
Chirp uses a small, fast English model (Whisper tiny.en). It is accurate for clear, everyday English dictation in a reasonably quiet room. Heavy accents, specialist jargon, names and background noise cause more mistakes than they would with larger models, so it is worth a quick read-through before you send anything important.
English only. The bundled model is an English-only Whisper model, and there is currently no option to switch languages.
Chirp runs on macOS 13 (Ventura) or later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, and on 64-bit Windows 10 and 11. On Apple Silicon it uses the GPU through Metal, so a short dictation is usually transcribed in well under a second. Intel Macs and Windows PCs use the CPU and are a little slower.
Chirp is free to start with 28 transcriptions, with no account and no time limit. After that, a license is $9.99 per year for unlimited transcriptions, and you can activate it on up to 5 devices. That is less than a dollar a month.
On a Mac, press Fn (or Option+M) once to start recording and again to stop. On Windows, press Alt+M. You can change the Option+M / Alt+M shortcut in Settings > Keyboard.
Up to 5 minutes. Chirp shows a countdown for the last 20 seconds and then stops and transcribes automatically. For longer pieces, dictate in several shorter chunks.
What to know before choosing a voice-to-text tool
From leaked chat histories to exposed credit cards to confidential emails read by AI — real incidents show why your words are safer on your own device.
How on-device speech-to-text works, what leaves your computer with cloud tools, and an honest look at Apple Dictation, Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, MacWhisper and more.
Most people speak about three times faster than they type. Writers are using voice dictation to beat writer’s block and capture ideas the moment they strike.
