Hold Right ⌥, talk, and your words land in whatever app is focused. No cloud, no account, no subscription — $5, once.
Buy AFK — $5Notarized DMG · license key by email · works on 3 of your Macs
One key, anywhere in macOS. No window to find, no app to switch to.
Speech is transcribed on the Apple Neural Engine at 15–30× realtime. Your audio never touches a server.
Release the key and the words are typed into whatever was focused: Mail, Slack, your editor, a terminal.
Powered by NVIDIA's Parakeet v3 model running locally on Apple Silicon. Fast, accurate, multilingual — and private by architecture, not by policy.
No sign-up, no login, no telemetry dashboard with your name on it. Buy it, get a key by email, activate, done.
Not a subscription. It's $5 while it's half-baked, and the price rises $5 every 10 sales as the product firms up — so the earliest believers pay the least, forever.
Dictation as a game: a career rank ladder from Bronze to Grandmaster, lifetime words, time saved, WPM, streaks. Typing less is a stat you can climb.
AFK ships a real CLI, so scripts and AI agents can transcribe too — pipe a meeting straight into your agent of choice:
$ afk transcribe meeting.m4a | claude -p "summarize"
| Price | On-device | Account required | Agents / CLI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AFK | $5 once | Yes, always | No | Yes |
| Wispr Flow | $15/mo | No — cloud | Yes | No |
| Superwhisper | $8.49/mo or $249 lifetime | Yes (local models) | Yes | No |
| MacWhisper | €59 once | Yes | No | No |
Prices as listed on each product's site, July 2026. They're all good tools — AFK just makes a different trade: everything local, one small payment, and a CLI.
macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, on Apple Silicon (M1 or newer). Intel Macs aren't supported — the speech model runs on the Neural Engine.
Really. First launch downloads a ~1 GB speech model and optimizes it for your Mac — that one-time setup needs an internet connection and about 2 GB of free disk. After that, everything runs fully offline. Your audio is processed on your Mac and is never uploaded.
Two: Microphone (so it can hear you) and Accessibility (so it can type the transcript into the app you're using). That's the entire mechanism — there's nothing else to grant.
You get a license key by email right after purchase. Enter it once in the app to activate — one key works on up to 3 of your Macs.
No. You get a signed, Apple-notarized DMG — it opens without a Gatekeeper warning. Updates arrive in-app.
Five dollars. Yours forever. Never phones home.
Today's rung of the ladder: $5. It only goes up from here.
Buy AFK — $5