What Saywind does, and what it doesn’t

Hold, speak, let go

Hold your dictation key and speak. Let go, and your words are pasted wherever your cursor is, in any app you can type in. Press Escape to cancel.

Saywind never presses Return, and your clipboard comes back a moment later. In a password field, the text waits on the clipboard instead.

Hands-free

Double-tap your dictation key to keep listening, and tap it again to stop. A pause doesn’t end it. After 20 minutes it stops by itself and pastes what you said.

On your Mac

Your speech becomes text on your Mac, with Parakeet Ultra, a speech model built on NVIDIA’s Parakeet. It downloads once, about 630 MB, and after that dictation works offline. Nothing you say leaves your Mac. See how Saywind turns speech into text.

Tidied as you speak

Ums, uhs and stumbles come out. Say “new paragraph” or “bullet point”, or number your points out loud, and the text is laid out for you. Simple slips like “at 2, sorry, 3” are fixed too. All of this works on every Mac.

On macOS 26 or later with Apple Intelligence, Smart clean-up goes further: it untangles harder changes of mind and turns more of the lists you say into bullets.

Clean-up takes words out and lays out the rest. It doesn’t add words or rephrase you. Other changes come from your own Snippets and Dictionary, and from British spelling if you use it.

Learns your words

Correct a misheard name once, where it landed, and Saywind remembers it. When it can’t tell a name from a change of wording, it waits for the same fix a second time. You can also add names and jargon to the Dictionary yourself, with how they sound.

In terminals, some code editors and long documents, or after a long dictation, Saywind doesn’t see your fixes, so choose Fix Last Dictation… from its menu bar icon instead. The privacy policy says what it watches, and for how long.

Snippets

Say a short phrase and Saywind types exact text in its place, like an email address or a sign-off.

25 languages

Saywind recognises 25 languages by itself, with nothing to switch. English comes with British or US spelling. Clean-up is made for English.

History and Insights

Your most recent 2,000 dictations stay on your Mac, each with the app it went into. Search them, copy one again, fix a word, or delete one or all. The privacy policy says where they’re kept.

Insights shows your words this week and an estimate of your speaking speed, worked out on your Mac.

Microphones

Saywind works with your Mac’s own microphone, and with wired, USB and Bluetooth ones. See which microphone to dictate with.

What you need

A Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) and macOS 14 Sonoma or later, and about 630 MB for the speech model. Smart clean-up also needs macOS 26 or later with Apple Intelligence.

What Saywind doesn’t do

• It runs on Macs with Apple silicon, not Intel Macs. There’s no Windows, iPhone, iPad or Android version.
• It has no command mode: you can’t ask it to rewrite, translate or summarise, or to change what you’ve already written.
• It doesn’t control your Mac by voice. Apple’s Voice Control does that (Apple’s guide for macOS 27, read 2 November 2026).
• It isn’t a meeting recorder, and it doesn’t transcribe audio files.
• There are no team plans or admin controls.
• Your history, Dictionary, Snippets and settings don’t sync between Macs.