Arugula is a free speech to text app for Mac that lives in your menu bar. Just hold a key, speak naturally, and your words appear wherever you're typing. Everything happens on your Mac — your voice never touches a server.
How It Works
No setup wizard. No account creation. Install Arugula, and it sits quietly in your menu bar until you need it.
Press and hold Right Option (or your custom hotkey). The menu bar icon starts to pulse — Arugula is listening.
Talk the way you normally would. The icon animates with your voice so you know it's working. Take your time — there's no timeout.
Let go of the key. Your speech is transcribed on-device in under a second, and the text appears right where your cursor is. In any app.
Smart Dictation
Most voice dictation apps treat every session like the first. Arugula remembers.
When Arugula gets a word wrong and you fix it, it notices. Over time, it builds a personal vocabulary — your names, your jargon, the way you actually talk. No training required.
Colleague names, product names, technical terms — the words that matter most are usually the ones dictation gets wrong. Arugula learns them from your corrections and gets them right next time.
Privacy
Arugula uses state-of-the-art AI speech recognition that runs entirely on your Mac's hardware. No cloud processing, no data collection, no compromises.
All speech recognition happens on-device
No internet connection required — works on airplane mode
No accounts, no sign-up, no email
No audio recordings are stored or transmitted
Your correction history stays on your Mac
Zero telemetry on your voice data
Features
Arugula replaces keyboard shortcuts and mouse clicks with your voice. Emails, messages, documents, code comments — anywhere you type, you can talk instead.
Email, Slack, Google Docs, your code editor, Notes — Arugula inserts text wherever your cursor is. No special integration needed.
Arugula sits in your menu bar and uses almost no resources when idle. When you hold the key, transcription happens in under a second on Apple Silicon.
Right Option is the default, but you can remap it to any key or combination. Set up different triggers for different behaviors.
Tile, resize, and snap windows with keyboard shortcuts. One less utility app to install on your Mac.
See how people use Arugula for email, documents, meetings, coding, and more. Or read our guide on how speech recognition works on Mac.
FAQ
No. Arugula runs whisper.cpp, a high-performance C++ implementation of OpenAI's Whisper model, entirely on your Mac. Your audio never leaves your machine. There are no servers, no accounts, and no telemetry on your voice data. The app works fully offline.
macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later on Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, or M4). The speech recognition model runs locally on your Mac's hardware, leveraging the Neural Engine for fast transcription with minimal resource use.
When Arugula inserts text and you immediately edit it — fixing a name, changing a word — Arugula detects the correction. It builds a local vocabulary file over time. No explicit training, no manual dictionary. Just use the app and fix mistakes as they come.
The Accessibility API lets Arugula insert text directly at your cursor position in any app. This is more reliable than clipboard-based approaches. If you prefer not to grant this permission, Arugula falls back to simulated paste or displays a panel you can copy from.
Yes. Completely free. No subscriptions, no in-app purchases, no "pro" version. Free.
Yes. Right Option is the default, but you can remap it to any modifier or key combination in Arugula's preferences.
Yes. Arugula never connects to the internet. All speech recognition happens on-device. You can use it on an airplane, at a cabin with no Wi-Fi, or with your network cable unplugged.
Arugula uses the same underlying AI model as many commercial transcription services, but runs it locally. Accuracy is excellent for English and improves over time as Arugula learns your vocabulary. It handles natural speech, pauses, and filler words well.
Free. Private. Gets smarter every day.
Coming soon to the Mac App StoreSee how Arugula compares to other dictation apps · Switching from Dragon?