A free, offline alternative to Wispr Flow for Mac
Kitflo does the thing people love about AI dictation (hold a key, talk, get clean text) without a subscription, an account or your voice leaving your Mac.
What Kitflo does
Hold fn (or Right ⌥ / Right ⌘) in any app, speak naturally, and let go. Kitflo pastes clean, punctuated text where your cursor is. It removes filler words like “um” and “uh”, keeps only your final version when you correct yourself (“meet at 5, no wait, 6” becomes “meet at 6”), and turns spoken lists into numbered lists. A quick tap starts hands-free mode.
Since version 1.1 it also records meetings: audio only, audio + screen, or audio + screen + camera, from the whole screen, one app like Zoom, or one window. It labels who said what and writes notes with a summary, key points and action items.
How it compares
| Kitflo | Typical cloud dictation app | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Monthly subscription |
| Where your voice goes | Stays on your Mac | Sent to servers |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Account | None | Required |
| Source code | Open (MIT) | Closed |
| Meeting notes with screen recording | Included | Usually a separate product |
Cloud apps can use very large models, so on long, messy recordings their polish can be richer. Kitflo trades that for privacy, zero cost and working on a plane.
Is it fast enough?
On a MacBook Air M2, text appears about 0.6–1.0 seconds after you release the key. Speech is transcribed on-device while you talk, and a small local model tidies it up in under half a second. We wrote up the numbers in how we got dictation under a second on an M2.
Requirements and install
- macOS 26 or later on Apple silicon (M1 or newer)
- About 1.6 GB of disk for the local models
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/harshkit/kitflo/main/install.sh | bash
Then allow Microphone and Accessibility. Kitflo’s page has everything else, and the code is on GitHub.
Kitflo is an independent project and isn’t affiliated with Wispr or any other company. Product names are used only to describe compatibility and comparison.