Yap turns speech into text anywhere you can type on your Mac. Set a hotkey, talk, press it again, and the words get pasted into whatever field you were in. It runs entirely on device using macOS 26's speech APIs, so there's no model to download and nothing leaves your machine. It's around 3,000 lines of native Swift in a 4 MB app that idles near 60 MB of memory. Free, MIT licensed, and built by Frigade because we wanted it for ourselves.
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I'm Christian, CTO at Frigade. Like everyone else, we recently switched to "Yap-based development". However, the dictation tools we tried either wanted a subscription, made us download and run beefy 1GB+ models, or shipped a whole browser engine to run a menu bar icon. Many of them also rely on sending your private transcripts to remote APIs (even Apple's built in dictation!).
How did we do this? With macOS 26, Apple shipped an on-device speech API called SpeechAnalyzer that turned out to match frontier API models in benchmarks, so we built Yap on top of it for ourselves and open sourced it.
You set a hotkey, talk, press it again, and the text lands in whatever you were typing in. It carries no model of its own and makes no network calls, and the whole thing uses just a few MB of memory.
It's free and MIT licensed. Would love your feedback, and I'm happy to get into the Speech APIs or the Swift side if you want to know what's under the hood.
This is such a great project. I’m Korean, and I think it’s incredibly clean, polished, and easy to use. Is this built using Speech Analyzer and Foundation Models? It’s incredibly well made.
the paste-based insertion is the part i'd poke at. macOS deliberately blocks the accessibility APIs from reading or writing into secure text fields - password fields, a password manager's own vault unlock, sudo prompts in terminal - specifically so assistive apps can't fill them. does yap detect it's in a secure field and just decline to paste, or does the hotkey still fire and it dictates into empty air / fails silently there? asking because "works anywhere you can type" and "macOS explicitly carves out a class of fields no assistive app can touch" are going to run into each other somewhere.
Congrats on the launch, this looks awesome! On-device, open-source dictation for Mac is exactly what I've been wanting.
Great App. @Wispr Flow killer :-) . I tried and discontinued wisper because I thought talk to text should be part of the OS as a free feature. Looks like you guys solved that problem. One issue is verbal stumbles. If you can fix that, it will be a super cool.
that's a great product! + after everything else being bloated, a few MB of memory and no network calls feel like such a relief.
Paste is the part I'd want to hear about. If you're putting the transcript on the clipboard to insert it, you're stomping whatever I had copied, and that's the bug that gets a dictation app deleted on day two. Restoring the previous pasteboard afterwards mostly works but races with anything else watching it. Separately, your description says it idles near 60 MB and your comment says a few MB, worth picking one.
About Yap on Product Hunt
“Open-source voice dictation for Mac, fully on-device”
Yap launched on Product Hunt on July 30th, 2026 and earned 149 upvotes and 23 comments, placing #11 on the daily leaderboard. Yap turns speech into text anywhere you can type on your Mac. Set a hotkey, talk, press it again, and the words get pasted into whatever field you were in. It runs entirely on device using macOS 26's speech APIs, so there's no model to download and nothing leaves your machine. It's around 3,000 lines of native Swift in a 4 MB app that idles near 60 MB of memory. Free, MIT licensed, and built by Frigade because we wanted it for ourselves.
Yap was featured in Productivity (657.3k followers), Artificial Intelligence (474.9k followers), GitHub (41.3k followers) and Menu Bar Apps (12.2k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 288.9k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Yap?
Yap was hunted by Christian Mathiesen. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Christian Mathiesen