Kivo for offline dictation on Mac

Kivo is a Mac dictation app that turns speech into text at the current cursor. It uses a press-and-hold shortcut to start and stop recording. The publisher demonstrates how the app can remove fillers and repeated words before inserting the result as one edit.

How a dictation session works

Hold the chosen key, speak and release it to insert the text. Kivo says it opens the microphone only while the key is held. A single undo removes the edit. The app also lets a user add names and jargon that ordinary dictation may get wrong. That makes it useful for a recurring vocabulary, such as a set of customer names or terms used by a team.

Where processing happens

The publisher says Kivo downloads a speech model once and works offline after that. It also says audio is neither uploaded nor saved. To listen for the global shortcut and put text at the cursor, Kivo requires macOS Accessibility access. A prospective user can check whether that permission and the app’s installation method fit their organization before adding it to a work computer.

Price and preview limitations

Kivo is free and the publisher lists no account or paid tier. Its website describes version 0.1.2 as an unsigned preview for English on Mac. It says the preview is slower than the project’s target. Start with a few non-sensitive sentences and some names you often use. Check the cleanup and the cursor insertion in the applications where you want to dictate before adopting it for longer messages.