Questions about Hush, answered

Hush is a free, open-source (MIT) dictation app for Macs with Apple Silicon. Hold a key (Fn by default), speak, and let go: Hush types clean, punctuated text into whatever app your cursor is in. Speech recognition runs on your Mac, so it works offline and your audio is never uploaded.

Yes. Hush is free forever and open source under the MIT license. There is no time limit, no paid tier, no account and no payment of any kind.

There isn't one. Hush runs on your own Mac, so there are no servers to pay for and nothing to charge you for. There are no ads and no data to sell, because Hush never sees your data. The code is public, so you can check.

Macs with Apple Silicon (M1 or later). Intel Macs are not supported.

Yes. Once you have downloaded a speech model, dictation works without an internet connection. Only AI clean-up with a cloud provider needs a connection.

Open an issue on GitHub. Pull requests are welcome too; the source code is all there.

Hush builds aren't notarized by Apple, which requires a paid Apple account, so macOS asks you to confirm the first time you open the app. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway (on macOS 14 and earlier you can also Control-click Hush and choose Open). See the install steps. The source code is public, so you can also build it yourself.

Microphone, to hear you, and Accessibility, to listen for your shortcut and paste text into the app you are using.

Start with Fast (Parakeet V3). It's quick, accurate in English and 24 other European languages, and about a 480 MB download. Choose Live preview (Nemotron Streaming) to watch your words appear while you talk, or Most accurate (Granite Speech 4.1) when accuracy matters more than speed. Whisper and other open models are in the full model list.

Yes. Tap or double-tap your shortcut and Hush keeps listening hands-free until you tap it again. Holding the key still works as push to talk, and Esc cancels a recording.

Yes. Press Ctrl+Cmd+V to paste your last dictation again, or choose it from the Hush icon in the menu bar. Recent dictations are also in your history.

Yes. Music and videos pause while Hush is listening and carry on when you stop, and Hush only resumes what it paused. You can choose to lower the volume or mute instead, or leave audio alone.

It depends on the model. Fast (Parakeet V3), the default, covers English and 24 other European languages. Whisper models cover 99 languages, and other models in the list add Chinese, Japanese, Korean and more. The app's interface is available in 26 languages.

It is optional. When enabled, Hush sends the transcribed text (never audio) to a provider you choose, such as Groq, OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Cerebras or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, or uses Apple Intelligence on supported Macs, to fix punctuation, filler words and tone. Without it, everything stays on your Mac. With Apple Intelligence or a local server such as Ollama, clean-up stays on your Mac too.

Locally, in the Hush settings file on your Mac. They are not stored in the macOS Keychain and are never sent anywhere except to the provider they belong to.

Quit Hush, drag it from Applications to the Trash, then delete the folder ~/Library/Application Support/com.hush.software, which holds your settings, history, recordings and models.

Hush is free and open source, and recognizes speech on your Mac. Wispr Flow is a paid monthly service that processes speech in the cloud, and it is available on more platforms. See Hush as a Wispr Flow alternative or the full comparison.

Both can recognize speech on your Mac. Hush is free and open source, and its AI clean-up and per-app styles cost nothing beyond your own provider key, or nothing at all with Apple Intelligence. Superwhisper is a paid app whose free version covers local dictation without AI clean-up, and it does more today, such as transcribing files and running on Windows and iPhone. See Hush as a Superwhisper alternative.