Yapper: Voice to Text Keyboard

Talk instead of typing. Yapper is a voice keyboard for iPhone: tap the mic, speak, and your words appear in the app you're using. Speech is turned into text on your iPhone, not on a server.

INSTANT, NOTHING TO DOWNLOAD
• Yapper uses Apple's newest on-device speech model by default. It's built into iOS, so there's nothing to download or load: turn Yapper on and start talking.
• It's fast and remarkably accurate, with punctuation included.

TWO LANGUAGES, EVEN MID-SENTENCE
• Pick a second language and switch whenever you like: "I need to go al supermercado before it closes." Spanish, French, Mandarin, Cantonese and more, still entirely on your iPhone (iOS 26 or later).

PRIVATE BY DESIGN
• Transcription runs entirely on your device. Your audio and your text are never uploaded.
• No account, no sign-up, no ads, no analytics, no tracking.
• Works offline, even in airplane mode.

NO LIMITS
• Unlimited dictation. No word caps, no weekly quota, no subscription.

WANT EVEN MORE ACCURACY? ADD PARAKEET
• Optionally download NVIDIA Parakeet, an open speech recognition model that runs on your iPhone's Neural Engine.
• It takes a few seconds to start each time; Yapper shows the time left, and can use Apple's model in the meantime so you never wait.

CLEAN TEXT, NOT A RAW TRANSCRIPT
• Removes "um", "uh" and stutters ("I I think") automatically. Turn it off anytime.
• Personal dictionary: "when I say X, write Y" for names, jargon and shortcuts.
• Undo the last dictation with one tap.

TYPE BY VOICE IN MESSAGES, EMAIL, NOTES AND MORE
• The Yapper keyboard works in almost any app with a text field, including terminals and chat apps.
• A regular typing layout is built in, so you can switch between talking and typing.
• Every dictation is also copied to the clipboard.
• Long dictations work, and a phone call in the middle doesn't lose what you already said.

START DICTATING YOUR WAY
• From the keyboard, Control Center, the Action Button, Back Tap, Siri or Shortcuts.
• A Live Activity in the Dynamic Island and on the Lock Screen shows when the mic is on, with a button to turn it off.

HISTORY AND STATS, KEPT ON YOUR PHONE
• Search and copy past dictations, including ones that failed.
• Play back a recording or transcribe it again. Recordings are kept for 30 days by default (anywhere from an hour to forever, your choice), and the text stays when a recording goes.
• Select several at once to copy, share or delete them.
• Export your History as text, Markdown, CSV or JSON, with or without recordings, and AirDrop it or save it to Files. Import it on a new iPhone: no account needed.
• See your words dictated, words per minute and streak.

GOOD TO KNOW
• Setup: add the Yapper keyboard in Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards, and turn on Allow Full Access. Full Access is needed only so the keyboard can pass your words from the Yapper app, which records the audio, through a private folder shared on your device. The keyboard itself contains no network code. Without Full Access you can still type with it, but not dictate.
• iOS doesn't let keyboards use the microphone directly. The first time you dictate, Yapper opens briefly to start listening, then takes you back to your app (if it can't, swipe right along the bottom edge to return). The mic then stays ready for as long as you choose (5, 15 or 60 minutes), and the orange mic indicator and the Live Activity show it the whole time.
• Apple's speech model needs iOS 26 or later; on earlier versions Yapper uses Apple's previous on-device recognizer. If iOS doesn't have the newest model for your language yet, iOS downloads it from Apple when you ask.
• Parakeet is an optional one-time download of about 632 MB, started only when you tap Download. That download is the only time Yapper itself uses the internet.
• iOS switches to its own keyboard in password fields, and some apps don't allow third-party keyboards.

Yapper is open source under the MIT license: github.com/justingluska/yapper