Ghost Pepper

100% local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS. Hold Control to record, release to transcribe and paste. No cloud APIs, no data leaves your machine.

Download the latest release — macOS 14.0+, Apple Silicon (M1+)

Features

• Hold Control to talk — release to transcribe and paste into any text field
• Runs entirely on your Mac — models run locally via Apple Silicon, nothing is sent anywhere
• Smart cleanup — local LLM removes filler words and handles self-corrections
• Menu bar app — lives in your menu bar, no dock icon, launches at login
• Customizable — edit the cleanup prompt, pick your mic, toggle features on/off

How it works

Ghost Pepper uses two open-source models that download automatically on first launch:

	Model	Size	What it does
Speech-to-text	WhisperKit (small.en)	~466 MB	Transcribes your speech to text
Text cleanup	Qwen 2.5 (1.5B + 3B)	~3 GB	Removes filler words and self-corrections

Models are served by Hugging Face and cached locally after first download.

Getting started

Download the app:

1. Download GhostPepper.dmg
2. Open the DMG, drag Ghost Pepper to Applications
3. Grant Microphone and Accessibility permissions when prompted
4. Hold Control and speak

Build from source:

1. Clone the repo
2. Open GhostPepper.xcodeproj in Xcode
3. Build and run (Cmd+R)

Permissions

Permission	Why
Microphone	Record your voice
Accessibility	Global hotkey and paste via simulated keystrokes

Acknowledgments

Built with WhisperKit, LLM.swift, Hugging Face, and Sparkle.

License

MIT

Why "Ghost Pepper"?

All models run locally, no private data leaves your computer. And it's spicy to offer something for free that other apps have raised $80M to build.

Enterprise / managed devices

Ghost Pepper requires Accessibility permission, which normally needs admin access to grant. On managed devices, IT admins can pre-approve this via an MDM profile (Jamf, Kandji, Mosaic, etc.) using a Privacy Preferences Policy Control (PPPC) payload:

Field	Value
Bundle ID	com.github.matthartman.ghostpepper
Team ID	BBVMGXR9AY
Permission	Accessibility (com.apple.security.accessibility)