Why I Built Halopen

I talk more than I type now. Somewhere in the last year — between running a cafe and a stack of software projects from the same desk — my hands stopped being the fastest way to get words out of my head. I hold a key, I say the thing, and it appears wherever my cursor happens to be. The keyboard, the object every laptop has been designed around for forty years, has quietly become optional in my own day.

That sounds like a small change. It is not. Once you stop thinking of writing as typing and start thinking of it as speaking, a lot of friction you had stopped noticing just disappears. The half-formed email gets said out loud and it's done. The commit message, the Slack reply, the note to myself — all of it leaves my head at the speed I think instead of the speed I can peck.

But there was one problem I could not get past, and it's the reason Halopen exists.

The tools kept editing me

Every dictation tool I tried wanted to improve me. I'd say something plain and a little messy — the way people actually talk — and the software would hand back a tidied, corporate version of it. Contractions expanded. The "no wait, scratch that" silently removed. My half-sentences buffed into full ones. The intensifier I leaned on for emphasis politely deleted.

It felt helpful for about a week. Then I started noticing what it cost. When a tool smooths your words, it throws away the part that was yours: the bluntness, the half-joke, the specific way you'd say a thing to one specific person and not to anyone else. And you can always tidy faithful text later if you want it cleaner. You can't go the other way. Once your voice has been pressed flat into corporate English, there's nothing left in the transcript to rebuild it from. It's gone.

I didn't want a tool that wrote like a better version of me. I wanted one that wrote down what I said. That became the whole rule of the app, and almost nobody builds for it: a dictation tool should write down what you said, not a polished version of what you said.

You can polish faithful text. You can't recover register from text that's already been smoothed.

The engine, and why I care where it runs

Halopen is verbatim by default. It keeps your contractions, your intensifiers, the place you switched thoughts mid-sentence. Polish is a choice you make on purpose, not a thing that happens to you. As you speak, a live preview shows what's about to land at the cursor, so you can re-state or spell something out before it commits — correcting your computer the way you'd correct a person who misheard you.

Under the hood it uses gpt-4o-transcribe for cloud transcription, with biasing toward the text already sitting next to your cursor — so a name or a piece of jargon you just used is more likely to come back spelled right. Apple's own SFSpeechRecognizer drives the instant on-screen partials while you're still talking.

And because not everything you say should leave your machine, there's an on-your-Mac mode that runs Whisper Large v3 locally through WhisperKit on Apple Silicon. In that mode the audio never leaves the Mac at all. I built that for the obvious reasons, but mostly for a quiet one: if a dictation tool is going to live in the background of your whole working life, you should get to decide where your voice goes.

It works where I work

Halopen lives in the menu bar and types into anywhere a cursor goes — Mail, Slack, Notes, a browser, the Terminal. The place it surprised me most was my code editor. I write a lot in Cursor and Claude Code, and talking to the machine instead of typing at it changed the texture of the work. Aider, Continue, Cline, Windsurf, Zed, Xcode, VS Code, the JetBrains tools, iTerm2, Warp, Ghostty — if it takes a cursor, Halopen will put words in it.

The other things came from using it every day and getting annoyed at the gaps. There's a local audit log of every cloud transcription, exportable as JSON, so nothing is a black box. There's a recovery store, because the worst feeling in dictation is a long, good take that vanishes — so the audio and text are held where you can get them back. And there are voice snippets, little spoken triggers that expand into text I'd otherwise retype fifty times a week.

Some things I decided on purpose

Direct download, not the App Store. Halopen ships as one disk image — Apple Silicon and Intel together — signed with my Developer ID and notarized by Apple, ready in about five minutes. Going direct lets the app reach deeper into the system than the sandbox allows, which is exactly what "type anywhere a cursor goes" requires.

A free tier that's actually a tier. Eight thousand words a month, forever, no credit card, no countdown clock pretending to be generous. That's enough to find out whether talking to your Mac fits how you work before you pay a cent. When you outgrow it, Pro is $19 a month, $179 a year, or — if you'd rather never think about it again — $499 once to own it for good. Students get half off. If it's not for you, there's a 14-day refund, by email, no interrogation.

No hype in the product, and none here either. Halopen isn't going to revolutionize anything. It does one thing — it writes down what you said — and it tries to do that one thing better than the thing that smooths you into a stranger.

Where it came from

Halopen didn't start as its own app. It started as the voice engine inside Composed, my planning app, where the whole point was to let people say a plan out loud and have it just be handled. The transcription had to be faithful for that to work — "dinner with Sam, not Sara" is the kind of mistake that ruins the trust in one shot. Once that engine was good, it was obvious it wanted to be everywhere, not just inside one app. So I pulled it out, gave it a hotkey and the ability to type into the whole system, and Halopen was that.

Here's how I think about it. Typing is one of the oldest frictions between a person and a computer, and for forty years we mostly took it for granted. It's the first one I've managed to get rid of in my own days — not in a demo, in real life, every working hour. If you move words around for a living, and you've ever watched a tool reach in and rewrite you into someone a little more boring than you are, that's the exact thing Halopen refuses to do.