I dictate a lot these days (messages, notes, prompts for coding agents), and Handy has been my go-to for it. It’s open source, fast, and the transcription runs entirely on your Mac.

The one thing I wanted was for it to get out of the way. No window, no Dock icon, just a little icon in the menu bar. So I forked it and made Handy Bar 🎙️

Handy Bar’s menu bar popover: microphone picker and the latest transcripts

  • Everything lives in the menu bar. It’s a native popover (AppKit, drawn from Rust), no WebView.
  • You see your words as you talk. A small indicator shows the mic level and the text forming live.
  • AI cleanup with tools you already have. It can run through claude -p or codex exec, so it just uses the subscription you’re already paying for. It even starts the tool while you’re still talking, to hide the start-up time.
  • Optional context, so names on your screen come out spelled right.

It’s an unofficial fork, and all the hard work (the models, the transcription) is Handy’s. I’ve kept the changes self-contained, so pulling in upstream updates stays easy.

It’s MIT licensed and builds from source for now. If it sounds useful, give it a try, and a ⭐ on GitHub is always appreciated 🙂