Dictation and read-aloud for Apple Silicon Macs
Speak. It types.
Your voice stays home.
Press one key, talk naturally, and clean punctuated text appears wherever your cursor is. Hushbird runs entirely on your Mac: no cloud, no account, no audio ever sent anywhere.
7-day full trial, no card needed. macOS on Apple Silicon (M1 or newer). Runs light: it picks speech models to fit your Mac's memory, and 8 GB is plenty.
F5 press to dictate
a 10 second web preview with a studio-grade model. The app itself runs entirely on your Mac and uploads nothing.
The reader turns any text into a warm voice. Cloud voice for this preview; the app also ships a fully private on-device voice.
How it works
Three moments, no windows to manage.
Press F5 in any text field
An email, a doc, a chat box. A soft chime tells you Hushbird is listening.
Talk like a person
Mumble, pause, change your mind mid-sentence. Even whisper at night; it boosts quiet speech on its own.
Press F5 again
Your words land as clean, punctuated text, right where your cursor was.
Both directions
It reads to you, too.
Read anything aloud
Select text in any app and Hushbird reads it in a warm, natural voice generated on your Mac. Long article, dense email, your own draft: hearing it is different from rereading it.
One press to read, one to stop. You pick the keys, or use a single key if that is your style.
Spanish, noticed automatically
Select Spanish text and Hushbird switches to a Spanish voice by itself. No settings to hunt for, no language menu.
Prefer studio-grade cloud voices? Add your own ElevenLabs key. Strictly optional, strictly opt-in.
The app
Quiet on the outside, busy underneath.
Your dictation history, a reader with voices and speed control, and settings that fit on one screen. No dashboards, no accounts, no feed.
Questions
Fair questions, straight answers.
Which Macs does it run on?
Any Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer) on a recent macOS. 8 GB of memory is enough; Hushbird picks speech models sized to your machine.
Where does my audio go?
Nowhere. Listening and speaking both happen on your Mac's own chip. There is no server, no account, and nothing to leak. The optional cloud voices are off unless you turn them on with your own key.
Does it work offline?
Yes. The one-time setup downloads the speech models; after that, dictation and reading work with no internet at all.
What languages does it handle?
Dictation is tuned for English and handles 24 more European languages. The reader speaks English and Spanish, and switches to Spanish on its own when you select Spanish text.
How does the trial work?
7 days, every feature, no card. When it ends, buy once for $39.99 or walk away; nothing renews, because nothing subscribes.
How many Macs can I use it on?
Two, say a desktop and a laptop, with one license key. Updates included.
The obvious question
Doesn't my Mac already do this?
Sort of. And if the built-in dictation made you happy, you would not be reading this.
Apple's dictation
Raw, take-it-or-leave-it transcription: dropped words mid-sentence, guessed punctuation, no idea what to do with a mumble, a technical term, or an accent. And when it silently stops working, the fix people trade on forums is a reboot.
Hushbird listens with state-of-the-art open speech models and hands you clean, punctuated text on the first try. Whispering at 1am included.
Apple's reader
It exists. It is called Spoken Content, it lives five clicks deep in Accessibility settings, and the voice most people get sounds like 2015. Almost nobody finds it, and few who do keep using it.
Hushbird reads with a warm, natural voice out of the box. One hotkey, no settings safari, no voice downloads to hunt for.
Privacy
The quiet part, said out loud.
Most dictation apps stream your voice to a server. Hushbird transcribes and speaks with open models running on your Mac's own silicon. After the one-time voice setup, it works with the network cable unplugged.
What never happens
- Your audio never leaves your Mac. There is no server to send it to.
- No account, no sign-in, no email address required.
- No analytics on what you say or what it reads to you.
- No subscription quietly renewing in the background.
Built on open, inspectable speech technology, not a black box.
Pricing
Pay once. That is the whole model.
- 7-day full trial first, every feature, no card needed
- Licensed for 2 Macs, say a desktop and a laptop
- Unlimited dictation and reading, no word counts or monthly caps
Subscription dictation apps run $8 to $15 every month, or about $100 to $180 a year. Hushbird costs $39.99 exactly once, partly because your Mac does the work instead of someone's cloud.