Where does my voice go?
Nowhere. Local by default.
Audio is captured, transcribed and cleaned on your Mac's Neural Engine. Nothing leaves the machine unless you turn on cloud mode yourself.
Push-to-talk dictation for Mac
Ramble in.
Clean text out.
Hold a key, say it however it comes out, let go. Rambleproof puts guarded, faithful text at your cursor. Keep processing on your Mac, or choose cloud providers with your own API keys.
Preview for macOS 26 on Apple Silicon. No account required.
You say
Confirm firstClick once to record and again to stop. Maximum 20 seconds.
You get
The optional website demo uses cloud providers. The Mac app uses local processing by default and only uses a provider when you enable it. Privacy
Live demo with two panels. The left panel shows what you say, the right panel shows the cleaned text. Click the mic button to record and click again to stop. Press Escape to cancel an active recording. If the microphone is unavailable, built-in examples play instead.
How it works
Three moves. No window to manage.
Rambleproof lives in the menu bar and waits for one key chord. It never takes focus from the app you are writing in.
- 01
Hold
Press and hold controloptionR while a standard editable field is focused. A small capsule appears and listens. Double-tap the shortcut to stay hands-free.
- 02
Ramble
Talk the way you think. Restart sentences, change your mind halfway, say um. Keep going until the thought is out.
- 03
Release
Let go of the shortcut. Rambleproof transcribes, applies guarded cleanup, and inserts into the field when macOS permits it. If direct insertion is unavailable, it copies the result and tells you.
Local or cloud
Choose the boundary, separately.
Transcription and cleanup are two choices, not one hidden switch. Keep both local, or select a provider for either stage with your own key. The active path is visible in Settings.
Local, the default
Private, offline, predictable.
Audio is transcribed locally and cleanup runs on the Mac. This is the right starting point for confidential drafts, travel, unreliable networks and anyone who does not want an account.
- • No provider API key
- • Works without a network after models are installed
- • Local fallback remains available
Cloud, when you choose it
Provider quality without a hidden proxy.
Bring an OpenAI, OpenRouter or Google Gemini key. The Mac app calls the selected provider directly and records when it had to fall back, so a timeout does not look like a successful cloud run.
- • Separate transcription and cleanup providers
- • Per-model circuit breakers and deadlines
- • Fidelity validation still applies to cleanup
Who it is for
Builders
Prompts, issue notes, code-adjacent prose and technical names with deterministic dictionary rules.
Busy communicators
Email, chat and documents without moving a thought through a separate editor window.
Privacy-sensitive work
Local mode for legal, health, client and unreleased material, subject to your own device controls.
Typing-fatigued users
A global shortcut and hands-free mode can reduce keyboard load; it is not a medical accessibility guarantee.
Proof
Measured where we can. Explicit where we cannot.
Current evidence, safe failure policy, and the boundary around each claim.
- local ASR inference
- median150 ms
- 188 English clips on an M4 MacBook Air. This is model inference, not total release-to-insert time.
- never becomes text
- Silence
- Hold the key in a quiet room and nothing appears. Rambleproof never fills a pause with words you did not say.
- cleanup safety checks
- 24
- Numbers, protected spans, negations, output shape and other fidelity risks are checked. Unsafe cleanup falls back to the transcript.
- insertion policy
- Fail-safe
- The original target must still be focused and editable. Otherwise text is copied instead of being typed into the wrong place.
Local ASR inference only. It excludes recording, audio-tail capture, cleanup, accessibility insertion, and clipboard fallback. Release-to-insert latency is not yet published because the signed-build hardware matrix is still a release gate. Method and release gates.
- ordered commits
- local fallback
- secure-field refusal
- clipboard fallback
- memory-only history option
Why people switch
The doubts, answered.
Dictation apps usually fail in one of five ways. We designed against each of them.
Will it rewrite what I meant?
Designed to protect meaning.
Cleanup is checked for changed numbers, protected text, negations and suspicious output. When a guard fails, Rambleproof uses the transcript instead and records the fallback.
Is this going to summarize me?
Guarded cleanup, not a writing agent.
Local or cloud cleanup may remove fillers and false starts and repair punctuation. It is instructed not to summarize, answer, change tone or add facts, and validators reject risky output.
Will it get my names and terms?
A dictionary that learns your terms.
Add product names, people, acronyms and code words once. Deterministic replacement rules apply your preferred spelling without asking a language model to guess.
What about the train, the plane, the bad hotel wifi?
Works offline.
The local model is on disk. Airplane mode, captive portals and dead spots change nothing about how it works.
And a history
Every dictation is kept on your Mac with raw and final text, so you can copy, retry or delete any of them. Retention is yours to set.
What it is not
Rambleproof is not a notetaker and does not listen to your meetings. There is no required account. If you want cloud transcription or cloud cleanup, you bring your own API keys and pay the provider directly. The Mac app calls the selected provider; Zena Labs does not proxy those app requests.
What do I need to run it?
A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later) running macOS 26. Local transcription uses the Neural Engine, so Intel Macs are not supported. About 1 GB of disk for the local model.
Which permissions does it ask for, and why?
Microphone, to hear you while the key is held. Accessibility, to insert text at your cursor and to check that the focused field is not a password field before inserting anything. That is the list. No screen recording, no input monitoring, no network access is required for local mode.
Which languages are supported?
English is the only language covered by the published benchmark today. Other language support depends on the engine you select; Apple Speech can use a supported preferred system language. We will publish language-by-language results only after verification.
How does cloud mode work?
Cloud mode is off by default. If you turn it on, you paste your own API key for OpenAI, OpenRouter or Google Gemini into Settings. Audio is sent to the transcription provider; raw text is sent to the cleanup provider when cloud cleanup is selected. Local work starts as a fallback when cloud transcription is slow or fails.
What does it cost?
Pricing will be announced before the public release. The beta does not require an account. If you use cloud mode, you pay your chosen provider for its API calls.
Does it work in every app?
It targets standard editable controls exposed through macOS Accessibility. Web editors, terminals and apps with custom fields can behave differently. Rambleproof verifies that focus did not move; when direct insertion is unsafe or unsupported, it copies the text and tells you instead of guessing.
Waitlist
Get the Mac build the day it ships.
One email when Rambleproof is ready to download, and The Mac Dictation Playbook right away as a thank you.