Commandment
Voice to text, instantly.
Just press a shortcut and speak.
BYO OpenAI API key, no subscription required.
How it works
Commandment is a dictation app that lives in the macOS menu bar. Press Option and D, say the thing you were going to type, press it again, and the text lands where your cursor already was. There is no window and no dock icon. It runs as a menu bar agent, so the only time you see it is when you go looking for it.
It is bring your own key. You paste an OpenAI API key into settings, it goes into the macOS Keychain, and you pay OpenAI for the seconds you actually dictate rather than paying a subscription to have it sit idle. Audio is captured at 24 kHz mono and streamed to the Realtime API, transcribed by default with gpt-4o-mini-transcribe.
One thing worth knowing before you install it. Putting text into another app needs macOS Accessibility permission, because that is the only route one app has to type into another. Grant it and transcripts appear directly in whatever you had focused. Skip it and nothing breaks: the transcript goes to your clipboard instead and you paste it yourself.
