Hold to talk, or tap to toggle
Push to talk is the default: your finger on the key is the on switch. For longer stretches, switch to tap once to start and tap again to stop.
Hold to talk.Let go, and it is already typed.
WaveOne is dictation for the Mac that puts the words where your cursor already is. No window to switch to, nothing to copy and paste. Recognition runs on your Mac, so your voice stays on it.
- 1Hold the shortcut
- 2Say what you mean
- 3Let go. It is typed.
2on-device recognition engines
27translation engines to choose from
13languages the app speaks
0bytes of audio ever uploaded
The gesture
Built around one gesture
Press and hold, say it, let go. Everything else in WaveOne exists to keep that half second honest.
A panel that never takes focus
The recording panel shows the level and the elapsed time, and never becomes the active window. The field you were typing in is still the field you were typing in.
Esc throws the take away
Started over halfway through? Press Esc. Nothing is inserted, nothing lands in your history, and your clipboard is exactly as you left it.
A sentence is never lost
Some fields refuse text written into them. When that happens WaveOne copies the take for you and says so on screen, so you paste it yourself instead of saying it again.
Three keys, no modes
One dictates. One dictates and translates. One dictates and tidies the wording. Which key you pressed decides what happens, so there is never a mode you have to remember you are in. Rebind any of them, and WaveOne tells you when a combination is already spoken for by macOS.
Nothing else is listening
WaveOne registers the shortcuts you assign and watches no other keys. There is no keyboard monitoring, and the microphone opens only while you are holding the key.
Recognition
On your Mac. Every single time.
There is no cloud recognition mode to end up in by accident, because there is no cloud recognition mode. WaveOne picks between two on-device engines for you, and either way your audio stays where you said it.
Nothing to download on macOS 26
On macOS 26 WaveOne uses Apple’s built-in speech engine. No model, no setup, no first-run wait: your very first sentence works.
One local model on macOS 15 to 25
Earlier systems download a compact model once and work offline from then on. An interrupted download picks up where it stopped rather than starting over.
Three sizes, your call
Fast, standard or maximum. Choose where you want to sit between speed and accuracy, change your mind later, and delete the sizes you are not using.
Offline from end to end
Dictate on a plane. Recognition, your vocabulary, the history and the insertion itself all work with the network switched off.
Silence stays silent
Say nothing and nothing is inserted. Three independent checks keep a room’s hum, a cough or a stray keystroke from becoming a sentence you never said.
The language you speak
Set the language WaveOne listens in, and switch it from the menu bar without opening settings. The full list comes from the engine itself, not a shortlist we picked.
Dictate and translate
Say it in one language, write it in another
The second shortcut does both jobs in one press, which is the difference between a thought you can finish and one you have to go and translate afterwards.
One press, both jobs
Hold the second shortcut and speak. The recording panel shows the direction the whole time, so you always know what is about to land at your cursor.
Translated on this Mac too
Apple’s built-in translation runs locally by default. Language packs are downloaded in settings, deliberately never in the middle of a sentence.
Your own words as the fallback
If translation is slow, unavailable or missing its language pack, WaveOne inserts what you actually said and tells you why in one line. Nothing is swallowed.
Your words
Teach it the words it gets wrong
Names, product terms, library names, abbreviations. The handful of words that keep coming out wrong is the real reason people give up on dictation, so fixing them is a first-class feature, not a settings page.
Two layers, not one list
Bias terms nudge the recognizer before it decides. Replacement rules correct the text after it comes out. Between them they catch what either one alone would miss.
Fix it straight from the history
Open the take that came out wrong, select the part that is wrong, type what it should have been. The rule is written for you, and it stops happening.
Yours to take with you
Import and export as CSV to hand a list to a colleague, or carry everything across machines as an encrypted backup.
Polish
Tidying, on the takes you pick
WaveOne does not rewrite what you said, so tidying is not a switch you leave on and then forget about. It has a key of its own, and that key is the whole decision.
A key of its own
Press the plain shortcut and your words go in as you said them. Press the polish one and a language model cleans up the wording first. There is no app-wide setting that could quietly be rewriting everything.
Three presets, no prompt to write
Punctuation only, email tone, or code and technical writing. Pick the one that matches what you are typing into and get on with it.
Local, or a service you already set up
Apple’s on-device model does it without a key and without the network. Or point polish at one of the engines you configured for translation, rather than setting the same provider up twice. With neither in place, the key says so before you speak instead of taking a sentence it cannot deliver.
Engines
On your Mac, or your pick of the cloud
Translation and polish run on this Mac by default: offline, free, nothing to configure. When you want a particular provider, connect any of 27 engines with your own key. WaveOne talks to each one directly, with no relay server in between.
System (on-device)
DeepL
Google
Microsoft
Tencent
Baidu
Youdao
Alibaba
Volcano Engine
Amazon
OpenAI
Claude
Gemini
DeepSeek
Azure OpenAI
Kimi
Doubao
Qwen
ERNIE
Hunyuan
Groq
OpenRouter
302.AI
AiHubMix
Ollama
LM StudioRecognition is missing from this list on purpose. It has no cloud option at all, in any tier, at any price.
Privacy
Your voice does not leave your Mac
No account, no backend, nothing collected. The App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected, and there is nothing behind it for us to collect.
Audio has nowhere to go
Recognition is on-device only, so your voice is never uploaded, not even to us. That is a property of how WaveOne is built, not a setting you have to find and switch on.
Recordings are off by default
With them off, WaveOne does not even keep a file name. Turn them on and you can see exactly what they take up on disk and delete all of it in one go.
Asked once, before the first byte
Turning on a cloud engine for translation or polish names the destination and asks you to agree first. Every destination you agreed to is listed in Settings ▸ Privacy, and can be revoked one at a time or all at once.
Sandboxed, zero dependencies
Always in the App Sandbox, built on Apple system frameworks. No analytics, no crash reporters, no third-party SDKs. Keys for optional cloud services live in the macOS Keychain, never in plain text.
Pricing
Free for 14 days, then your choice
Every feature is unlocked during the trial, with no account and no payment. Keep WaveOne with a subscription, or buy it once and own it.
Monthly
US$6.99/ month
Billed monthly, cancel anytime
Yearly
US$39.99/ year
US$3.33 a month, billed yearly
SAVE 52%Lifetime
US$99.99one-time
Pay once, use forever
Prices are shown in US dollars; your App Store shows the price for your region. The 14-day trial is free and needs no purchase. Subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel them in your App Store settings.
Stop typing what you could just say.
One shortcut, on your own Mac, in the app you are already in.
Download WaveOne