Shaberu

Talk instead of typing. On the Mac it is a tap of a modifier key; on iPhone it is a keyboard. Either way the tidied-up text lands where you were already working.

Download for macOS

macOS 14+ ・ Apple Silicon

Or with Homebrew:

brew install --cask walkccc/tap/shaberu

The iPhone keyboard is coming to the App Store.

On the Mac it never leaves the machine. On iPhone it has to.

The Mac app transcribes locally: a 630MB model downloads the first time, and after that dictation is offline — the recording is turned into text on the machine and discarded, never written to a file and never uploaded. The iPhone cannot do the same, and the reason is worth stating plainly. A keyboard extension is refused the microphone outright, so the app has to stay resident to hold it on the keyboard's behalf, and a few hundred megabytes of resident model is the first thing iOS reclaims. So on iPhone the audio goes to the cloud with your own API key, and the setup screen asks for that key before anything works.

Inside

• Chinese and English are detected as you speak — there is nothing to switch.
• Chinese comes out as Taiwanese Traditional or Simplified, and Traditional is converted by wording rather than character by character.
• Polishing is Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini — two models each, or off. The API key is yours and lives in the Keychain.
• The last 200 dictations are kept as plain text on the device, for when a window took the text you meant for another one.
• Mac. Tap right Shift to start, tap again to send, Esc to throw it away — the key can be either Shift, Option, Command, Control or Fn. Text arrives by paste, with the clipboard borrowed and put back exactly, or keystroke by keystroke where an app refuses one.
• Mac. Say "new line", "new paragraph" or "make that a list" mid-sentence and it is obeyed rather than typed.
• iPhone. Switch to the Shaberu keyboard with 🌐, tap the microphone, talk, tap again. There is no QWERTY on it and there is not meant to be — the keyboard you switched away from is better at the four keys it would have carried.
• iPhone. The microphone is open only while you are speaking, so the recording indicator is lit for those seconds and not for the whole time Shaberu is waiting in the background.