Hold a key. Speak.
It's typed where you are.
Parlando turns your voice into finished text in any app on your Mac. Hold the right Option key, say what you mean, let go, and the sentence lands at your cursor with the capitals, the punctuation, and your names spelled your way.
For Macs with Apple silicon on macOS 26 or later. Signed with our Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple.
Measured Sunday, October 4, 2026 on Parlando 0.2.0 (build 111): a 2.79-second recorded sentence fed at real-time pace to a MacBook Pro with M1 Max on macOS 26.6.2, while that Mac carried a heavy workload (load average 85 on 10 cores). Details in Speed.
You think faster than you type.
The thought is ready long before your fingers are. Dictation closes that gap, as long as the words come out right the first time.
That is where dictation usually breaks. The text arrives without punctuation. A colleague's name comes back as a common word. A filler "um" sits in the middle of a client email. You spend the time you saved fixing what you said.
Parlando is built around the fix, not the transcript. The speech engine is Apple's own, built into macOS 26. Everything around it, the cleanup, the names, the tone for each app, the history, is Parlando's, and it is what makes the text something you can send.
What the speech engine heard, and what Parlando typed
Heard
Um so let's move the board memo to Thursday and loop in Kenn
| Email (Formal) | So let's move the board memo to Thursday and loop in Ken. |
|---|---|
| Slack (Casual) | So let's move the board memo to Thursday and loop in Ken |
| Texts (very casual) | so let's move the board memo to thursday and loop in ken |
| Notes (Excited!) | So let's move the board memo to Thursday and loop in Ken! |
Parlando 0.2.0's output for this sentence, with one dictionary correction (Kenn to Ken). Add Ken to your vocabulary and very casual keeps his capital too.
Hold, speak, and let go, in any app.
Parlando lives in your menu bar, and you never switch to it to dictate: the key is the whole interface. Its window is there for your history, dictionary, and settings.
Hold Right ⌥
Put your cursor anywhere you can type: Mail, Slack, Messages, a browser, a document, a chat with an AI. Hold the right Option key. Prefer another? Right Command and the Globe key are one click away.
Say it like you mean it
A small panel shows your words as you speak, with a level meter so you know it is listening. It never takes focus from the app you are in, so your cursor stays exactly where it was.
It lands, finished
Release the key and the finished sentence is typed at your cursor: fillers out, first word capitalized, sentences closed. Say "new line" or "new paragraph" and you get exactly that.
Long thought? Tap twice.
Tap the key twice and speak: Parlando keeps listening until you press it again, so a long email does not need a held finger. The panel shows Latched while it keeps listening.
Spacing that reads the room
Before it types, Parlando looks at up to 12 characters before your cursor. Continuing a sentence? No stray capital and the right single space. Starting fresh? A capital. Your acronyms, "I", and your own names keep their capitals either way.
Your names, spelled your way.
Parlando gives you two modes of Apple's on-device speech engine, and you pick. Personal listens for the words in your dictionary, so the names you say every day come back spelled your way. General leans on punctuation. Both run on your Mac.
- Words it listens for. Add your people, your products, and your jargon, and the Personal engine expects them before it decides.
- Corrections it applies. "Heard this, write that", matched on whole words, longest phrase first, so a mis-hearing is fixed every time after the first.
- Mentions. Teach it "at Ken" once and it types @Ken, ready for Slack.
- Snippets. Say a short phrase and Parlando types the long one: your address block, a standard reply, a sign-off.
- Bring it with you. Import a list from a file, one entry per line, or pull in your Wispr Flow dictionary in one step. Parlando reads it without changing it and lists any entry it skips, with the reason.
In our own test of one sentence with six proper nouns, the Personal engine with a 452-word personal vocabulary got five of six names right; the General engine got two of six. Across 40 real recordings with 37 names, Personal got 30 (81%) and General 25 (68%). Measured August 3 and 4, 2026 on an M5 MacBook Air, with the app's previous name, Detto. Your result depends on the vocabulary you add.
Three entries, and what they do
| Correction | Kenn → Ken |
|---|---|
| Mention | at Ken → @Ken |
| Word to expect | Parlando |
Heard
Um so let's move the board memo to Thursday and loop in at Ken
Typed
So let's move the board memo to Thursday and loop in @Ken.
Parlando 0.2.0's output. A mention leaves a possessive alone: "meet at Ken's place" stays as said.
The right register for every app.
An email to a client and a text to a friend should not read the same. Parlando sorts your apps into four places you write, personal messages, work messages, email, and everything else, and gives each its own tone.
- Formal. Capitals and full punctuation, the default everywhere.
- Casual. Capitals kept, the closing full stop dropped, the comma after "hey Sam" gone. Reads like a person in Slack.
- Very casual. All lowercase for personal messages, with "I", acronyms, and your own names protected.
- Excited! The final full stop becomes an exclamation point for work, email, and the rest.
Style changes punctuation and capitalization only. It never changes, adds, or removes a word, and it runs on your Mac. Need finer control? Per-app rules let you set fillers, spoken commands, capitalization, and spacing for one app at a time, with suggested rules ready for Claude, ChatGPT, Slack, Messages, and Mail.
Select it. Press a key. It's rewritten.
Dictation gets the words down. Transforms reshape words that are already on the page, in any app. Select some text, press ⌥ 1 through ⌥ 8, and the selection is replaced with the result. If the provider call fails, your selection stays as it was.
- Polish rewrites for clarity in your voice, with switches for concise, clearer wording, and better order and structure.
- Prompt Engineer turns a spoken ramble into a structured prompt for an AI, with a title, a role, the task, the context, and the inputs.
- Bullets turns a spoken paragraph into a short list of its points.
- Slack, Email, and Professional reshape the same thought for the reader on the other end.
- Strip the AI removes the giveaway phrasing of machine-written text and leaves your meaning as it was.
- My voice does everything Strip the AI does, then tightens sentences into plain English.
- Create your own. Write an instruction, give it a key, use it anywhere.
Transforms use a model from Anthropic or OpenAI with your own API key, which you paste once in Settings. Only the text you selected is sent, with the transform's instruction; dictation itself never needs a key.
Cloud cleanup is the same key put to work on punctuation. Switch the cleanup engine to Cloud in Settings and the transcribed text of each dictation, never the audio, goes to your provider for repunctuation. Parlando checks what comes back before typing it: a result that changes a single word is thrown away and the on-device text is typed instead.
Every dictation, kept and searchable.
A minute of talking lost to a stray click is how people give up on dictation. Parlando keeps every dictation for 24 hours, or for three days, seven days, or forever if you choose.
Nowhere to type? It shows you.
If no text field had focus when you let go, Parlando types nothing into the wrong place. A card appears with your words and a Copy button, and the dictation is in your history.
A history you can search
The Dictations pane groups every dictation by day, with search, one-click copy, and the original transcript beside the cleaned-up version. Keep it for 24 hours, three days, seven days, or forever.
Recent, from the menu bar
Your 12 newest dictations sit in the menu bar. Click one to copy it. One that never reached a text field is marked, so you can grab it.
See where your words go.
Insights counts your dictations, words, minutes spoken, speaking pace, and day streak for today, the last seven days, 30 days, or all time, with a bar for each day and the apps your words went to. Click an app to jump straight to those dictations.
It is computed from the history on your Mac each time you open it. Only the app is recorded with each dictation, never what was in the window around it.
Built for the writing you do all day.
Parlando works wherever your cursor can go. These are the places it changes the day most.
Talk to Claude and ChatGPT at full speed
Speaking lets you give an AI the context, constraints, and examples that typing tempts you to skip. Hold the key and explain the whole problem in the time it takes to say it, then select it and press ⌥ 2 to have Prompt Engineer turn the ramble into a structured brief. Suggested rules keep your words exactly as spoken for AI apps, where fillers and capitals matter less than every detail.
Replies that read like you sat down to write them
Formal style gives Mail full sentences, capitals, and a closing period. Dictate the reply, say "new paragraph" between thoughts, then select it and press ⌥ 5 if you want Email to add the greeting and the close. Add a correction once and that same mishearing is fixed every time it comes back.
Slack and Messages without the stiffness
Set work messages to Casual and your Slack replies keep their capitals but drop the closing full stop, the way people actually write there. Teach it "at Priya" once and get @Priya. Set personal messages to very casual and your texts go out lowercase, with your own names still capitalized.
First drafts at the speed of thought
Tap the key twice and talk through a whole section hands-free. Parlando closes each sentence at your natural pauses, and saying "new paragraph" starts the next one, so the draft arrives ready to edit instead of as a single run-on block.
Capture the idea before it is gone
Between meetings, in a notes app, in a task manager's quick entry: hold, say it, let go. If nothing had focus, your words wait on a card and in your history, so a stray click never costs you the thought.
Forms, search boxes, spreadsheets, terminals
Anywhere you can type, Parlando can type. Where an app does not report what is before the cursor, Parlando falls back to a fixed spacing rule, and per-app rules let you tune fillers, capitals, and spacing for that one app.
The words are on your Mac already.
Parlando transcribes with the speech engine Apple builds into macOS 26, running on your Mac's own chip. The words are recognized where you speak them, so the speech engine finishes a fraction of a second after your last word.
| What we measured | Result | Conditions |
|---|---|---|
| Speech engine finished, after a short sentence ended | 0.061 s best of four (0.061, 0.067, 0.072, 0.092 s) | Parlando 0.2.0 (111), 2.79-second recording fed at real-time pace, MacBook Pro M1 Max, macOS 26.6.2, load average 85 on 10 cores. October 4, 2026. |
| First words on screen, while still speaking | 0.54 s (0.535 to 0.551 s) | Same runs. |
| Speech engine finished, after a 15-second passage | 0.167 s best of four (0.167 to 0.198 s) | 14.96-second recording, same Mac, same load, same day. |
| Whole chain: file, speech engine, formatter, keystrokes, text field | Exact match: "Let's move the board memo to Thursday and loop in Ken." | Same build and Mac, typed into a text view inside the app's own test harness. |
| Fanless versus fan-cooled | 0.119 s on an M5 MacBook Air, 0.115 s on the M1 Max | Short recording, August 3, 2026, earlier build named Detto. The Air carried load average 11.67; the M1 Max 4.72. |
What the speech-engine time covers: from the moment you stop to the engine's final text. Formatting and typing follow it on your Mac. The checks behind these numbers are listed on Capabilities.
Bring your Wispr Flow dictionary with you.
You have spent months teaching Wispr Flow your names. Parlando's Import from Wispr Flow reads that dictionary straight from your Mac and brings across your corrections, your vocabulary, your snippets, and your @mentions in one step. It reads without changing anything, and it lists every entry it skips with the reason.
Wispr Flow's default key is Fn and Parlando's is the right Option key, so both can run side by side while you compare them on your own words.
Your AI assistant can set it up for you.
Parlando includes a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Point Claude or another MCP-capable assistant at Parlando --mcp and it can read your preferences, add names and corrections, set per-app rules, and search your history, in plain words: "Add these six colleagues to my dictation dictionary."
It runs only when your assistant starts it, and it talks to that assistant over a local pipe on your Mac.
The facts, from each maker's own page.
Every price and claim below was read from that company's own website or documentation on Sunday, October 4, 2026. Click a name to check it yourself.
| Parlando | Wispr Flow | Superwhisper | MacWhisper | ParlaParla | Parlin | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| To start | Free download | Free, 2,000 words a week on desktop | Free with Whisper models | Free | Free on the Mac App Store | 7-day trial |
| Paid plans | No charge for the app; Transforms and cloud cleanup bill your own Anthropic or OpenAI key | Pro $15 a month, or $144 a year | $8.49 a month, $84.99 a year, or $249.99 once | Pro €64 once | Pro $19 once; Cloud $9.99 a month | $39 once until October 31, 2026, then $69 |
| Where your speech becomes text | On your Mac, with Apple's speech engine | In the cloud | On your Mac with Whisper, or cloud models | On your Mac, or with cloud models | On your Mac with Apple Speech, or OpenAI | On your Mac |
| Custom dictionary | Yes: names it listens for, plus corrections and snippets | Yes | Yes | Word replacements | Yes | Yes |
Prices are in US dollars except MacWhisper, which lists euros, and are for each maker's direct-download edition where it sells more than one. Wispr Flow's privacy page: "Transcription always happens in the cloud."
Plain answers about your words.
Your voice
Dictation is transcribed on your Mac by Apple's on-device speech engine. Parlando asks for two permissions: the microphone, and Accessibility so it can see your key and place your text.
Your history and dictionary
Stored as files in a folder on your Mac, ~/.parlando. Settings shows each file and its size, and "Forget everything" in the menu clears your history. Long dictations are pasted through the clipboard, and your clipboard is put back about a third of a second later.
What goes online
Parlando checks for updates every six hours and installs only builds signed by our Apple Developer ID, between dictations. With your own key added, Transforms send the text you selected, and cloud cleanup (off until you turn it on) sends each finished dictation, to the provider you chose. Your usage counters stay on your Mac.
This website
This site counts visits and clicks with PostHog, held in memory for the length of your visit with no cookies and no session recordings, and it honors your browser's Do Not Track setting. The download page reads the same signed update feed the app uses, so the file you get is the build the app itself would install.
Free to download.
Parlando is a free download, and every feature on this page is in it from the first launch. Transforms and cloud cleanup use your own Anthropic or OpenAI key, billed by that provider at its own rates.
Updates arrive by themselves: the app checks every six hours and installs between dictations, so the app keeps itself current without a reinstall.
Everything above, in one free download
- Hold-to-talk and tap-twice dictation in any app
- Personal dictionary, corrections, snippets, Wispr Flow import
- Style for four kinds of writing, plus per-app rules
- Eight built-in transforms and your own
- History, recovery, Insights, and an MCP server
macOS 26 or later, Apple silicon. Signed and notarized.
Asked, answered.
Will it type into the wrong window?
Parlando types where your cursor is when you let go of the key. If no text field has focus, it types nothing and shows your words on a card with a Copy button instead, and the dictation is saved in your history.
Which Macs does it run on?
Macs with Apple silicon (M1 and later) on macOS 26 or later. The speech engine Parlando uses is part of macOS 26.
Does it work without an internet connection?
Dictation does: the speech engine runs on your Mac once macOS has its speech model installed, which macOS fetches the first time a language is used. Transforms and cloud cleanup call the provider you chose, so those need a connection.
Which language does it dictate in?
Parlando dictates in US English, using the speech model macOS provides.
Do I need an API key?
Only for Transforms, cloud cleanup, and re-processing a past dictation. Dictation, the dictionary, Style, per-app rules, history, and Insights all work without one.
Can I bring my Wispr Flow dictionary?
Yes. Choose Import from Wispr Flow in the menu or in Settings. Parlando reads your Wispr Flow dictionary on your Mac without changing it, brings across corrections, vocabulary, snippets, and @mentions, and lists anything it skipped with the reason.
Can I change the key?
Yes: right Option, right Command, or the Globe key, from the menu bar or Settings. Tapping twice keeps dictation on until you press again.
Does it use my clipboard?
For short dictations Parlando types the words directly. Over 200 characters it pastes them, then puts your clipboard back about a third of a second later. You can choose always type or always paste in Settings.
How do updates work?
Parlando checks its signed update feed when it starts and every six hours, verifies the download's checksum and Apple Developer ID signature, and installs between dictations. To check right away, choose "Check for Updates now" in the menu.
I used Detto. Is this the same app?
Yes. Detto is now Parlando. The first Parlando launch moves your history, dictionary, and settings across, and macOS asks once more for the microphone and Accessibility because the app's identifier changed.
Your next email is one held key away.
Download Parlando, drag it to Applications, grant the microphone and Accessibility, and hold the right Option key.
macOS 26 or later, Apple silicon. Signed with our Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple.