Parrot

Fast, private voice-to-text for Apple Silicon Macs. Press one shortcut, speak naturally, and get clean text ready to paste.

Audio and transcription stay on your Mac. There is no account, subscription, or cloud API.

Install

Open Terminal, paste this entire line, and press Return:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/willmather95/parrot/releases/latest/download/install.sh | bash

The installer walks you through the two macOS permission prompts, downloads the local speech model, verifies your microphone, and starts Parrot automatically whenever you log in.

At login, a crash-aware supervisor opens Parrot as the signed app through macOS Launch Services. That keeps its menu-bar bird and bottom-of-screen listening pill attached to the active desktop instead of stranding them on the desktop that happened to exist during startup. A deliberate menu-bar Quit stays quit; a crash or fatal hotkey failure is restarted automatically.

It also sets the Globe key to "Do Nothing" so macOS does not intercept Parrot's shortcut. You can change that later in System Settings > Keyboard.

Requires: macOS 14 or newer on an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer). The first install downloads the on-device speech model and can take a few minutes.

Use it

Best workflow, especially in Codex: Use Parrot like a voice clipboard. Press once and let go, speak, press once again and let go, then paste the transcript.

1. Click the text field where you want your words to appear.
2. Press Control + Fn/Globe once, then release both keys. You do not need to hold them while you talk.
3. Speak naturally. You can dictate a quick thought or talk for a minute. The pill at the bottom of the screen confirms that Parrot is listening.
4. When you are finished, press Control + Fn/Globe once again, then release both keys.
5. Parrot transcribes your recording locally and quickly. In Codex, press Command-V to paste the transcript.

In some apps, Parrot inserts the transcript automatically. If the text already appears, you are done. If it does not, Parrot has copied it to your clipboard, so press Command-V. This clipboard workflow is the most dependable way to use Parrot across different apps.

Codex desktop currently does not expose its composer as a focused Accessibility control. Parrot therefore uses the safe clipboard fallback there instead of guessing which opaque control owns focus. Auto-insert continues to work in apps that expose a specific editable field.

Parrot will not start in a password or other secure field. If focus moves into one while Parrot is working, it discards that transcript instead of putting it on the clipboard.

Troubleshooting

Run one check that verifies permissions, the real microphone path, and the selected local model:

parrot doctor --live-audio --model-ready

If macOS permissions were changed after installation, run:

parrot setup
parrot install --launch-at-login

After a restart, the idle bird should appear in the menu bar. During recording, macOS shows its microphone privacy indicator and Parrot shows the listening pill near the bottom of the active display. If either Parrot surface is missing, reinstalling the login item with the command above reattaches the app to the current GUI session.

Useful commands

parrot doctor                          # check permissions and shortcut settings
parrot models list                     # list available speech models
parrot models download <id>            # download a model before selecting it
parrot --model whisper-large-v3-turbo  # use the larger multilingual model
parrot install --uninstall             # stop launching Parrot at login

What this fork adds

This is a customized fork of Digimata's original Parrot project. Full credit to Digimata for the foundation.

The fork adds:

• A Parakeet model tuned for fast English dictation
• Safer cursor insertion that verifies the original field before typing
• Clipboard fallback when focus changes
• Protection for secure and unobservable fields
• Runtime recovery for microphone route changes and repeated dictation
• Clear clipboard fallback diagnostics when an app does not expose a focused Accessibility control
• Launch Services startup so the menu-bar item and overlay follow the active desktop after login
• A checksum-verified app installer with launch-at-login setup and rollback

The stable com.digimata.parrot app identity is intentionally preserved so macOS can retain existing Accessibility and microphone permissions across updates.

Build from source

swift build -c release
.build/release/parrot --help

See docs/architecture.md for the design and safety model.

How the release is verified

The installer downloads the latest GitHub release, verifies its published SHA-256 checksum, checks the app signature and stable identity, and installs /Applications/Parrot.app. Updates are staged transactionally. If a running replacement cannot become ready, the installer restores the prior app and service.

This is an open-source beta. The release is ad hoc signed and is not Apple-notarized. The installer removes quarantine only after the checksum, archive paths, signature, and app identity pass verification. You can read the installer before running it.

License

Parrot remains available under the original project's MIT License.