Saylark

At a glance

Saylark is a free, MIT-licensed Mac menu bar app for dictating prompts to coding agents. Hold Fn, talk, and release to paste your words at the cursor; press Return mid-take in the Claude, Codex or ChatGPT desktop apps to paste and send at once. The Parakeet speech model runs locally, and no language model rewrites what you said.

Good fit

Developers on an Apple Silicon Mac who talk to coding agents all day and want prompts sent verbatim. Cleanup only drops fillers, collapses stutters and turns "new line" into a break, leaving numbers and identifiers alone. A plain-text dictionary fixes names like Supabase or kubectl, and an agent can maintain it with saylark dict.

Consider something else when

Skip it if you use an Intel Mac or anything older than macOS 26, since neither is supported. It also suits people poorly who want dictation to tidy grammar or rephrase rambling speech, because Saylark deliberately has no AI rewriting step. Windows and Linux users need a different app.

Start here

Download Saylark.dmg from the releases page and drag it to Applications. Onboarding asks for Microphone, Input Monitoring, Accessibility and clipboard ("Always Allow") permissions, then downloads a speech model of about 600 MB. Hold Fn in the practice field, speak and let go. If nothing happens, check Input Monitoring in System Settings.

Cost and requirements

Free, with no account. It needs macOS 26 or later, an M1 or newer Mac and about 700 MB of disk for models, downloaded once from Hugging Face; dictionary terms add a second model of about 100 MB. The saylark command line tool is not in the DMG and must be built from source with Xcode 26 (Swift 6.2).

Limits to know

It is early: 0.1.0 is the only release and the repository has two commits. Return-sends defaults to the Claude, Codex and ChatGPT desktop apps, though you can extend it. Another app listening to Fn, including macOS Dictation, can paste words twice, and source builds lose permissions unless signed with the same certificate.

Related work

• Plainsay (alternative)
• Lavoi (alternative)
• LocalBolo (alternative)
• Wispr Flow (alternative)

Still unclear

• The README does not say which languages the Parakeet model recognizes, only that Settings includes an accent option, so non-English speakers cannot tell whether it fits.
• No recognition accuracy or speed figures are published; the app reports each take's processing time locally, but there is no benchmark to compare against other dictation apps.