Pipit Voice Support

Pipit Voice turns your voice into text on your Mac. It needs a Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 15 or later.

Getting started

  1. Open Pipit Voice. A bird icon appears in the menu bar. Setup explains, then asks for, access to your microphone and Input Monitoring. If macOS asks, choose Quit & Reopen; setup picks up where you left off.
  2. During setup, choose English Only or Multilingual (25 European languages). Then, on Home, click Download next to the voice model. This happens once and takes a few minutes, depending on your connection. Keep at least 1 GB of free space.
  3. Click in any text field, hold ⌥ Option on the right side of the keyboard, and speak.
  4. Let go to stop. Pipit copies the text and shows “Copied — press ⌘V”.
  5. Press ⌘ Command V to paste.

If you skipped Input Monitoring and chose Control-Option-Space instead, press ⌃ Control ⌥ Option Space to start and press it again to stop.

Closing the main window doesn’t quit Pipit Voice. Open it again from the menu bar icon. Your recent dictations are in the menu bar history.

Permissions

Microphone

If Pipit can’t hear you, open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Microphone and turn on Pipit Voice. Then quit and reopen Pipit Voice. File transcription works without microphone access.

Input Monitoring (hold-to-talk)

Holding a single key while you talk (Right Option by default) needs Input Monitoring. Pipit only notices when modifier keys such as Option go down and up; it never records what you type.

  1. In System Settings > Privacy & Security > Input Monitoring, turn on Pipit Voice.
  2. If Pipit Voice isn’t in the list, click +, choose Pipit Voice from your Applications folder, then turn it on.
  3. If macOS asks, choose Quit & Reopen.

If you also have the direct-download Pipit installed, it has its own separate entry; turning it on doesn’t turn on Pipit Voice.

Prefer not to allow it? Choose Control-Option-Space instead, during setup or later on Home under Shortcuts. That shortcut doesn’t need any special permission.

Using the Fn/Globe key

If you choose Fn/Globe as your key, note that pressing it can also switch input sources or open emoji and dictation. To stop that, open System Settings > Keyboard and set Press 🌐 key to to Do Nothing. If you prefer not to change that setting, use Right Option instead.

Control-Option-Space does something else

If another app or a macOS input-source shortcut uses the same keys, choose a different shortcut in Pipit Voice, or change the other shortcut in System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts.

Voice model downloads

  • Download stalls or fails: check your internet connection and click Download again. Files that already finished downloading are kept. Networks that block huggingface.co will stop the download.
  • Not enough space: free up at least 1 GB, then try again.
  • Intel-based Macs: Pipit Voice requires a Mac with Apple silicon, because on-device speech recognition doesn’t run on Intel-based Macs.
  • Switching languages: click Reset Onboarding at the bottom of Home, choose the other language on the Language step, then download that model on Home. To free space first, click Delete next to the model you no longer need.

After the download, transcription works offline.

Optional AI cleanup

AI cleanup is off by default, and Pipit works fully without it. To use it, open Enhance and turn on Clean up with AI.

On this Mac

Where it can, Pipit runs cleanup on your Mac with Apple Intelligence: Runs on: This Mac. Nothing leaves your Mac, and you don’t need a key or an account. This needs:

  • macOS 26 or later, on a Mac that supports Apple Intelligence
  • Apple Intelligence turned on in System Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri. If it’s off, Enhance shows Open Settings, which takes you there.

After you turn it on, Apple Intelligence may need a while to get ready; Enhance says so, and Check again updates it. On macOS 15, or on a Mac that doesn’t support Apple Intelligence, This Mac is dimmed; hold the pointer over it to see why.

On-device cleanup has a size limit. If a dictation is too long, Pipit keeps your original transcript and lets you know. Very long file transcripts may be too long to summarize on this Mac; use OpenRouter or your own server for those.

OpenRouter or your own server

Prefer another model? Under Runs on, choose OpenRouter and add your own OpenRouter key, or choose Your own and enter the address of an OpenAI-compatible service, such as Ollama on your Mac. Pipit asks your permission before sending any text, and asks again if you change the destination. Your provider may charge for use.

Privacy

Your voice and transcripts stay on your Mac, including when AI cleanup runs on This Mac. Text is sent only to an AI provider you choose and allow. There’s no account, analytics or tracking. Read the full privacy policy, also available in the app under Help > Privacy Policy.

Contact

Email support@pipitvoice.com, or choose Help > Send Feedback in Pipit Voice. Include your macOS version and what you were doing when the problem happened. Please don’t send recordings or transcripts unless you’re comfortable sharing them.