Free, open source dictation for macOS
Hold a key. Speak. Text appears.
Bolo turns your voice into clean text in the app you are already using. It listens only while you hold the key, cleans up as it goes, and lands the words at your cursor.
press and hold · or hold space or right option
This browser demo uses your browser’s speech recognition and a simplified local cleanup. The real Bolo streams audio to Telnyx and cleans it up with an LLM. The microphone opens only while the key is held.
- average startup
- 188 ms
- fastest release-to-paste
- 715 ms
- keyboard
- any hotkey you like
The whole product is three gestures
Nothing listens before the hold. Nothing survives the release.
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Hold
The microphone opens the instant you press and closes the instant you release. Nothing before, nothing after, nothing saved.
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Speak
Talk the way you actually talk. Rambles, fillers, wrong dates you correct mid-sentence. Bolo keeps up with streaming transcription.
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Release
Fillers drop, self-corrections collapse, punctuation lands. Clean text pastes at your cursor and your clipboard is restored.
What’s inside
Dictation is easy. Cleanup is the product.
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Voice transforms
Select any text and say “Bolo, rewrite that: make it formal” or “Bolo, polish that” to rewrite in place. No dialog, no switching windows.
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Self-correction collapse
Say the wrong date, catch yourself, keep talking. “September 15th… actually, October” cleans down to October. It knows the difference between a correction and new information.
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Vocabulary aliases
Teach Bolo your recurring names once.
cloudbecomesClaudebefore the model ever sees it, and the terms you correct most get priority in transcription. -
Per-app cleanup styles
Email gets structure. Chat stays casual. Bind a cleanup style to Slack, Mail, Notes, or any app from the menu bar.
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Any hotkey
Right Option, Right Control, Right Shift, Fn, F1–F19, Caps Lock. Bind a second key to re-paste your last transcript.
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Local history, clipboard intact
Recent dictations stay on your Mac and are one menu-bar click away. Bolo snapshots your clipboard before pasting, then puts it back.
Voice commands
Say this. Get that.
| Say | Bolo does |
|---|---|
scratch that |
Deletes what you just dictated. |
actually <replacement> |
Corrects what you just said, in place. |
Bolo, polish that |
Rewrites the last dictation, cleaned up. |
Bolo, prompt that |
Rewrites the last dictation as a prompt. |
Bolo, rewrite that <instruction> |
Rewrites any selected text with your instruction. |
paste-last hotkey |
Re-pastes your most recent transcript. |
Under the hood
A small Rust runtime and boring, reliable infrastructure.
Install
Two minutes, one script.
macOS 12+ · Rust · Python 3 · your Telnyx API key
The script builds the binary, walks you through the hotkey picker, and registers Bolo as a login item. Grant Microphone and Accessibility when macOS asks. That’s the whole setup.
git clone https://github.com/a692570/bolo.git
cd bolo
./install.shOr paste this into your coding agent
“Install Bolo from github.com/a692570/bolo on my Mac.
It needs Rust, Python 3, and a Telnyx API key.
Run install.sh, then help me grant Microphone
and Accessibility permissions.”