Reed is a free dictation app for Mac. Hold a shortcut, speak, release; the text lands at your cursor, and your audio and dictated text stay on your Mac. This page covers setup, everyday use and what to do when something is off.
Requirements
A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer). The speech model runs on the Neural Engine, so the app is built for Apple Silicon only. An Intel Mac cannot open it.
macOS 14 or later. The optional AI cleanup tier needs macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence available; see Cleanup.
English. Dictation in other languages is not supported yet.
About 461 MB of disk space for the speech model, downloaded once during setup.
No account, no subscription, no trial period.
Setup
Install. Open the downloaded Reed.dmg, drag Reed into Applications, and open it from there. macOS may ask you to confirm opening an app downloaded from the internet. Reed appears in the menu bar; it has no main window.
Welcome. Setup opens on a welcome step.
Microphone. macOS asks for microphone access so Reed can hear you. If you use AirPods or another Bluetooth headset, note that macOS takes up to about a second and a half to switch them into microphone mode on each press; the built-in microphone responds immediately.
Accessibility. Reed asks for Accessibility access so it can write text at your cursor in other apps. Grant it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. Without it, macOS does not allow one app to insert text into another.
Shortcut. The default is holding ⌃⌥ (Control and Option). You can record a different combination, such as ⌃⌥R, here or later in Settings → Dictation.
Speech model. Setup downloads the model (about 461 MB) and prepares it for your Mac. This runs once, and setup continues only when the model has loaded, so this is the step that takes the longest. The model is kept in ~/Library/Application Support/FluidAudio/Models/.
Cleanup. The “Clean up what I say” option is on by default; see Cleanup.
Practice. The last step has a practice field: hold the shortcut, say a sentence, release.
Using Reed
Put the cursor where you want text, hold the shortcut, speak naturally, release. A small pill near the top of the screen shows Listening while you hold, then Done as the text lands. Reed writes the whole result at once; it does not type character by character.
Any app with a text cursor works: Mail, Messages, Slack, Notes, browsers, editors.
Apps that don’t accept direct insertion (some web-based editors, terminals) receive the text as a paste. Reed restores whatever was on your clipboard before, unless you copied something new in the meantime.
Say nothing, and nothing is written. Releasing without speaking shows a brief “Nothing to write” notice.
Long thoughts are fine. Pause as you think; Reed joins the pieces and keeps the version of a restarted phrase that you meant.
The menu bar keeps your last dictation. Click the Reed icon: the menu shows the most recent text with a Copy button, so you can paste it yourself if it did not land where you expected.
Cleanup
With cleanup on, every supported Mac gets Reed’s rules pass: filler words such as “um” and “uh” are removed, a restarted phrase is collapsed to the version you meant, sentences get punctuation and capitals, and spoken numbers are written as digits. Emphasis (“really really”), quotations and negations are kept as spoken. Cleanup never changes your meaning.
On macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence available, Reed additionally uses on-device Apple Intelligence to clean up harder sentences. Settings → Cleanup shows whether it is active and offers to open the Apple Intelligence setting if it is off. On earlier macOS versions the rules pass runs alone, so wording can differ between systems.
Turn off cleanup to keep the speech recognizer’s original transcript. The switch is in Settings → Cleanup.
Privacy
Speech recognition and cleanup run on your Mac. The app blocks the dictation path from the network, so your audio and your transcripts are never uploaded. The connections Reed does make (the speech-model download and updates) carry no dictation content. The full list is on What we collect; the full notice is on our Privacy page.
Reed has no analytics and no crash reports.
Updates
Reed checks for updates about once a day and offers them in the app. Use Check for Updates… in the menu bar menu at any time. The version you have is shown at the top of the menu and in Settings → About; the current public version and its notes are on What’s new.
Troubleshooting
Nothing appears after I release the shortcut
Click the Reed icon in the menu bar. If the text is shown under Last dictation, Reed heard you and the insertion failed: check that Accessibility is granted in Settings → Permissions (or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility), and use Copy meanwhile.
If the menu shows an error, it names the step that failed and, where possible, a fix.
Make sure a text field has the cursor before you hold the shortcut.
Reed doesn’t hear me
Check Microphone access in Settings → Permissions.
Pick the microphone you want in Settings → Dictation. If a mic delivers no audio at all, Reed shows “We couldn’t hear you” and offers the other mics to switch to.
With Bluetooth headsets, hold the shortcut a moment before speaking; macOS needs up to about a second and a half to switch them into microphone mode.
The shortcut doesn’t react
Open Settings → Dictation and confirm the shortcut. Holding modifier keys alone (the default ⌃⌥) or a modifier plus a letter both work; the bare fn key cannot be used.
Another app may already own that combination; record a different one.
The speech-model download is stuck
The download is about 461 MB and continues where it left off if you quit and reopen Reed. Check that your connection allows large downloads.
After downloading, the model is prepared for your Mac once; the menu says “Preparing speech model” while that runs.
The text is different from what I said
Turn off cleanup to keep the speech recognizer’s original transcript (Settings → Cleanup), then compare. Please tell us about wording that changed your meaning; that is a bug.
Reed transcribes English only for now.
Uninstalling
Quit Reed from its menu, then move it from Applications to the Trash. Reed’s data stays behind and can be deleted: the speech model (about 461 MB) in ~/Library/Application Support/FluidAudio/Models/, Reed’s log and review copies in ~/Library/Application Support/Reed/, and its settings (run defaults delete com.local.reed in Terminal).
About the examples on the homepage
The three speech-to-text examples are text, not audio recordings. On September 27, 2026 each spoken line was run through Reed’s rules cleanup and pause assembly (the same code the app ships with) in w20labs/reed at commit 7181cf5, the v0.3.0 release, and the outputs are shown verbatim. That code ships in Reed 0.3.1, the public build. Results from the on-device AI cleanup tier (macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence) can differ in wording. The homepage demonstration is an animation built from those examples, not a screen recording.
Contact
Report an issue from the app: Settings → About → Report an issue, or Report this on an error in the menu. It opens Reed’s bug report form on GitHub in your browser; Reed attaches nothing, and you choose what to post.