Free Flow
by MASHBOX Labs
Free dictation, on your device. Hold fn on a Mac, or tap the mic on the Free Flow keyboard on iPhone and iPad, and talk. A speech model on the device writes it down and puts your words where your cursor is.
Version 1.1 for Mac with Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later. A 11.0 MB disk image, notarized by Apple. iPhone and iPad with iOS 18 or iPadOS 18 or later.
SHA-256 of FreeFlow-25.dmg 1d05ef6f55e93a5b4f605a1bd062322ed89759081f6bf857f90b7c33f9383abb
On your Mac
Hold fn and talk, then let go: your words go in where your cursor is. Press fn twice for hands-free, then fn again to stop. Esc cancels.
Free Flow asks for the microphone, and for Accessibility so it can see fn and paste at your cursor. After each dictation the mic turns off, so the orange dot shows only while you talk.
On iPhone and iPad
Free Flow brings its own keyboard. Tap the mic key, talk, then tap the check key, and your words are typed where your cursor is.
Control Center, the Lock Screen, Siri and the Shortcuts app start and stop it too.
Dictionary
Add the names and words you say, spelled your way, like MASHBOX. Phonon-2 and Bark 3.0 Clean lean toward them as they listen, on your device. Their cards in Models say Dictionary.
100% private
Nothing you say leaves your device. Speech recognition and cleanup run on it, with no sign-in, analytics, ads or crash reporting.
Free Flow goes online only to download the speech model files you pick, from Hugging Face. It checks each file against a SHA-256 pinned in the app before it installs the model.
Speech models
On a Mac, and on an iPhone or iPad with enough memory, Free Flow picks Parakeet Ultra by Moondream, a post-training of NVIDIA's Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3. It covers 25 European languages, and so does Parakeet Redux, also by Moondream and the smallest download. Phonon-2 by Fermion Research is English only. So is Underdog Bark 3.0 by Conway Research: Clean leaves out “um” and false starts, and Pro writes every word. A C++ version of Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 comes in three sizes.
Cleanup with Apple Intelligence, Apple's on-device model, writes each dictation in the style you pick. It needs Apple Intelligence turned on, and macOS 26 or later on a Mac.
Free Flow's source is available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0: free for personal, school and nonprofit use; it may not be sold.