Open source voice dictation

Speak.
Text appears.

Hold a key, talk, release. Your words land in any app. Works with every keyboard. No subscription.

Install Bolo View source

Notes

Voice draft

Bolo turns short spoken thoughts into clean text in the app you are already using.

Dictating

188 ms average startup

715 ms fastest release-to-paste

Any keyboard Right Option, F19, Caps Lock, or pick your own

How it works

Fast local control, cloud transcription.

Bolo runs as a menu bar app. It records only while your hotkey is held, sends audio to Telnyx AI for transcription, then discards it. A small local transcript history stays on your Mac so you can recover recent dictations from the menu bar.

No always-on microphone

Audio captured only while your hotkey is held. Nothing before, nothing after.

Any keyboard, any key

Right Option on MacBooks, Right Control on external keyboards, F19 on mechanical boards, or pick your own.

Recover recent dictations

Text lands at your cursor, and recent transcripts stay available from the menu bar when you need to copy one again.

No subscription, no cloud storage

Bring a Telnyx API key. Audio is transcribed and discarded. Transcript history is local and can be cleared from the menu bar.

Under the hood

Built for speed and transparency.

Rust runtime, native AppKit hotkey listener, Telnyx AI transcription with Nova 3, optional LLM cleanup, and open logs you can actually read.

Runtime Rust 1.88+

Hotkey Configurable AppKit listener

STT Telnyx AI, Nova 3

Cleanup Local default, LLM optional

Install

Run Bolo on macOS.

Requires macOS 12+, Rust, Python 3, and a Telnyx API key.

git clone https://github.com/a692570/bolo.git
cd bolo
./install.sh

Speak.Text appears.