Today is a good day. Flit is out, and it is the first Mac app I have ever shipped.
Flit is dictation for macOS. Hold a key, talk, let go. Finished, formatted text lands in whatever app you are in, about 0.7 seconds after you release the key. Nothing you say leaves your Mac. Not the audio, not the text, not a screenshot. It all stays home.
Why another dictation app
I dictate a lot. Messages, emails, commit messages, first drafts of posts like this one. Every tool I tried made the same trade.
The fast ones stream your voice to a server, on a subscription, and some send a screenshot of your screen along with the audio. The private ones run on your Mac and make you wait: you let go of the key and a model chews through the whole recording before a word appears.
I wanted the speed of the first kind with the privacy of the second. Flit is that.
How it works
Flit runs the speech model on your Mac’s Neural Engine and feeds it audio while you are still talking, so the text is being written mid-sentence rather than after you stop. A small formatting model on your Mac’s GPU then removes the fillers, fixes punctuation, writes times and emails properly, and matches the tone of the app you are in. Casual in Messages, professional in Mail, your exact words in the terminal.
Anything with one correct answer is not left to the model. Clock times, spoken punctuation, your personal dictionary, snippets, and the file names in your open project are handled by fixed rules that give the same result every time. If the model misbehaves or runs late, Flit throws its answer away and keeps the deterministic text. Dictation can never break.
There is no server, no account, and no telemetry. Turn off wifi and nothing changes. You can check this yourself: run a network monitor and dictate all day. You will see the model downloads you started, the update checks you agreed to, and nothing else. The privacy page is the same document that ships inside the app.
What is in the box
- 99 languages, 25 of them streaming live as you speak. The rest run on a slower local model.
- Spoken commands. Punctuation, new paragraph, delete that, and the rest, handled by rules so they work the same every time.
- A personal dictionary that also repairs the words the engine mangles. Spell a term correctly once and the nonsense versions get fixed.
- Developer mode. Flit indexes the symbols in your open project, so a dictated file name comes out as the file name and not as three English words that sound like it.
- Per-app profiles. The tone follows the app, and you can set the rule per app.
- A polish dial. Verbatim, Clean, or Polished. Clean is about 0.15 seconds after key-up if you want it fast.
It needs macOS 14 or later on an Apple silicon Mac. The download is 21 MB, and the models come down on first run, so you choose which ones to keep.
Pricing
Flit is a one-time purchase. One payment covers two Macs and a year of updates, and when the year is over the app keeps working exactly as it is.
The standing price is $49. For launch, the first 50 licenses are $19, and there is a Lifetime license at $59 for the first 50. The site shows how many are left, counted from real sales rather than a timer. When they are gone, the price goes up.
There is a seven-day trial first, with no card and no account. Download it, use it, then decide.
What it took
Three names. The app started as SpeakMac, became Humm, and shipped as Flit. Humm was the one I liked, and it was already taken by three products in the same category, two of them direct competitors. A name you cannot defend in search is not a name. Flit is what a hummingbird does, so the bird on the icon stayed.
A rewrite of the formatting layer once I understood that latency was the wrong thing to optimize. An early version skipped formatting on the fastest engine to save a second, and shipped unformatted text. People would rather wait a second for the right text than get the wrong text instantly.
And a signing certificate, notarization, a licensing server, and a payment provider’s domain review, none of which have anything to do with dictation. I had shipped web products for years. A Mac app is a different amount of paperwork.
Try it
The trial is seven days, with nothing held back and nothing to sign up for. Talk. It is already written.
If it mishears something it should not, or you want a command that does not exist yet, tell me. Every report so far has turned into a fix.