Local speech recognition powered by the Qwen3-ASR model. Transcribes as you speak, with text ready about a second after you stop — entirely on your Mac, no internet required.
Can you send me the latest designs when you get a chance?
Yeah of course, I'll send them over in a few minutes. Just finishing up the last couple of screens now.
Three steps. No setup. No cloud accounts.
Press and hold a keyboard shortcut to start recording from your microphone.
The Qwen3-ASR speech recognition model processes your audio in real time, locally on your Mac.
Release the key and your transcribed text is pasted at the cursor — in any app.
Features
Whether you're writing emails, messages, docs, or code comments — speaking is faster than typing.
No app to open. No window to find. Just Parley lives quietly in your menu bar, always one hotkey away. It stays out of your way until you need it.
Sits in your menu bar
Your voice never leaves your Mac. No cloud processing, no accounts, no data collection. The speech model runs entirely on your machine.
Completely offline
Data sent to the cloud
English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Cantonese. Pick one or let the app detect the language automatically as you speak.
Any text field, any app. Emails, Slack messages, Google Docs, code editors, search bars — if you can type in it, Just Parley can type in it for you.
Built on proven speech recognition research, optimised for macOS.
Just Parley uses Qwen3-ASR from Alibaba's Qwen team — a 0.6-billion-parameter speech-to-text model that understands 30 languages and writes its own punctuation. It runs as an int8 ONNX model via sherpa-onnx, entirely on your CPU.
Speech recognition runs locally on your CPU and keeps pace with you while you talk. On Apple Silicon Macs (M1/M2/M3/M4) the text lands about a second after you stop. Intel Macs are fully supported with longer processing.
The entire model runs on-device. There are no API calls, no server roundtrips, no network requirements. Your speech is processed in the same process that captures it.
Five languages with automatic language detection. Speak in any supported language and Just Parley identifies it automatically.
No cloud. No accounts. No data collection.
Speech-to-text options for Mac, side by side.
| Feature | Just Parley | Apple Dictation | Cloud STT (Google, Otter.ai) | Whisper (local) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Works in every app | Yes | Partial | Browser only | CLI / manual |
| Fully offline | Yes | Partial | No | Yes |
| Privacy | 100% local | Some cloud | Cloud-based | 100% local |
| Latency | ~1s | ~200ms | 500ms-2s | 1-5s |
| Multilingual | 5 languages | Many | Many | 99 languages |
| Auto language detect | Yes | No | Some | Yes |
| Punctuation | Automatic | Automatic | Automatic | Automatic |
| Setup required | None | None | Account + API key | Python + CLI |
| Price | Free | Free | Subscription | Free |
Speech-to-text that pastes into any text field — chat apps, code editors, browsers, and more.
Free download. No subscription. No cloud.