Szept is dictation and screen capture for the Mac, built for working with AI agents. One payment gets you the source code too — so your agent can take the app wherever you want it to go.
$9.99 for the first 100 buyers then $25 one payment, no subscription
Unretouched screen recording — the pill over the desktop, and the words landing where the cursor was.
Nothing to switch to, nothing to copy and paste. Szept shows up for a few seconds and gets out of the way.
Hold fn and speak. Release, and the words land where your cursor already was — in any app. Press esc to throw a dictation away.
More than 60 languages, switching mid-sentence. Optional AI cleanup that keeps your words.
Screenshot a window or a region and mark it up. Scroll a long page into one image. Record the screen as MP4 or GIF.
Pin to screen, image to text, QR codes, translation.
With a capture on screen, hold fn and say what you want. Szept pastes your words and the file into the app you started from.
Nothing is sent until you press return.
There is no Whisper build in here and no Electron around it. Speech recognition happens in the cloud, on your Soniox key, so the app stays small, the Mac stays quiet, and an hour of talking costs cents — billed by Soniox to you, never by us. Measured on the shipping build, not estimated.
Two charts, both to scale, and both about the same decision: speech recognition happens on Soniox's servers, on your key, so you pay cents instead of buying a model with disk and RAM.
Third-party figures as published by Soniox, June 2026. Measured on a real account instead: $0.71 for 337 minutes — $0.126 an hour, and the app shows that figure for your own month.
Bars are to scale, and Szept's is a sliver on purpose: it keeps no model on disk and none in memory. Model sizes from whisper.cpp's own model repository.
Measured with footprint and top on the shipping build: 0.0% of a core across five one-second samples, and 82 idle wakeups in fifteen minutes — about a tenth of a wakeup a second, against Finder's 34,389. The 415 ms is the app's own last-connection figure.
No window to switch to. The pill lives at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds and never takes the keyboard away from the app you are in.
Words darken as they are confirmed. Nothing is pasted until you let go.
An agent can write a dictation app in an afternoon. What it can't know is everything that only breaks on someone else's Mac — the things this app learned over six months and 129 commits.
A sandboxed Mac app can't add itself to the Accessibility list. Onboarding points to a switch the user will never find.
SwiftPM's Bundle.module finds its resources on the machine that built the app — and fatal-errors everywhere else.
An ad-hoc signature changes on every build, so macOS shows Accessibility granted while the app is still refused.
ScreenCaptureKit doesn't resend an unchanged frame, so "wait for three identical frames" never fires on a live stream.
Every one of these is written down in CLAUDE.md, next to the code — the first file your agent reads.
A signed, drag-to-install DMG: drag it to Applications and hold fn. macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon. It is not notarized yet, so the first launch needs a right-click → Open — the FAQ has the one-line version.
The complete Swift project in a private GitHub repository: the app, its tests, and the scripts that build, sign and package it.
CLAUDE.md with 59 pitfalls, 5 design specs, 10 implementation plans and 559 tests — the context that makes an agent useful on day one.
Every release for twelve months, as a new DMG and in the repository. After that, everything you have stays yours.
Three windows out of the app: the searchable history, what cleanup does to your words, and the languages it listens for.
The Szept Source License is based on the PolyForm Internal Use License. Plain words here; the legal text is one click away.
Read the licenseThe first 100 buyers get it at $9.99. After that it is $25, for the same thing.
Renew updates for $9.99 a year — or don't. Nothing you have stops working.
Checkout by Polar. Taxes handled. You'll be asked for your GitHub username.
You'll also need a Soniox account for speech recognition. You paste your own key; real-time speech is about $0.12 per hour of talking, billed by Soniox. Szept never charges for it.
The pill taking a sentence, those words landing in a Claude Code prompt, and the numbers above — measured, not drawn. Every frame is the real app on a real Mac.
No voice-over yet, and no music — the picture is finished first.
No. The app works the moment you install it. The source is there for the day you want your agent to change something.
The DMG is signed but not notarized: notarization needs a Developer ID certificate whose private key is not on the machine that builds the releases, so a downloaded copy carries macOS's quarantine flag and is refused once. Either right-click the app → Open → Open, or run xattr -cr /Applications/Szept.app. One time only, and nothing about the app is different afterwards. INSTALL.md inside the DMG says the same.
Yes. Speech recognition sits behind one Swift protocol, ASREngine. Point your agent at it and at the Soniox implementation next to it.
Nothing breaks. You keep the app, the code and every update you received. Renew when you want the next year of releases.
Not under this license. If you've made something other people should have, write to mariusz@szyma.co.
Audio goes to Soniox, under your own account. AI cleanup, if you turn it on, sends text to the provider you choose. The developer runs no servers and receives nothing.
Write to mariusz@szyma.co within 14 days of buying and you get the full amount back, no questions asked. I would rather lose the sale than have you regret it.