Hold a key, talk in English or Spanish, release. Clean, polished text appears wherever you were typing. And nothing you say ever leaves your computer.
Free for everyday dictation. No account. No audio uploads. Ever.
Kwilua lives in your menu bar and works in every app: email, Slack, docs, code editors, anything with a text field.
Press and hold the Fn key from any app. A small pill shows you are live.
English or Spanish, detected automatically. Fillers, false starts and self-corrections are fine.
Your words are transcribed and cleaned on your Mac, then inserted at the cursor. Instantly.
Speak either language and Kwilua detects which one, accents included. Made by a bilingual founder who uses both every day.
Whisper, the open speech model behind the best transcription tools, running entirely on Apple Silicon. No internet needed after the one-time model download.
Filler words removed, punctuation and capitalization fixed, offline. Say "press enter" to send your message.
Teach it your names, products and jargon so they come out spelled right. Snippets expand a spoken cue into full text.
Built-in mic, USB, or AirPods. Kwilua follows your system default or pins the device you choose.
Every dictation saved locally so you can copy it again. Your data, on your disk, in plain JSON.
Cloud dictation apps upload your voice to their servers. Kwilua was built so that is impossible by design.
Audio is captured, transcribed, cleaned and inserted entirely on your Mac. No account, no telemetry, no audio uploads, free or paid. The only network use is downloading the speech model once. Optional cloud features are off by default and labeled exactly as what they are, right where you would turn them on.
No "AI assistant" joining your call. Kwilua will record locally, and when the meeting ends you get two things: the full transcript, and a summary built around the moments YOU marked. Press one key at the important part; Kwilua saves the timestamp and a screenshot of what was on screen, and the summary is organized around them. All on your machine.
The free tier is the full dictation experience, local forever.
Launch pricing, subject to change before release.
A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later) on macOS 14 or newer. Transcription runs on the Neural Engine, so it is fast and easy on your battery. Intel Macs are not supported.
A Windows 10/11 (64-bit) version is in development, with the same rule: everything stays on your machine. One difference: you hold Right Ctrl instead of Fn, because on most PCs the Fn key belongs to the keyboard firmware and no app can use it.
The app keeps itself up to date, and when a better speech model comes out it tells you. Big downloads always ask first, with the size shown. Nothing is fetched silently.
Really. There is no server to upload it to: Kwilua has no account system and no telemetry. Audio is processed on your machine and stays there. The one optional cloud feature (Pro users can plug in their own Claude API key for higher-quality notes) sends transcript text only, never audio, is off by default, and says exactly that next to the switch.
From the Nawat verb (i)hkwilua, "to write". Nawat is the language of the Pipil people of El Salvador, where our founder is from. An app that writes when you speak, named in the language of the land.