murmur
The dot up here is real. Drag it, click it.
Say the idea before it’s gone.
A small dot that floats over everything on your Mac. Click it, speak, press Enter. Your words land in Apple Notes, ready for when you have time.
Free · 1 MB · macOS 26 Tahoe or later · Apple Silicon.
Calm until you need it.
Three states, and that is the whole app. Nothing below is a screenshot — it is the same dot and the same card, running here.
A dot when idle
Thirty-six points of glass, sitting wherever you last put it. No window, no menu, no dock icon. Drag it out of the way and it stays there.
A card when you speak
The card opens beside the dot and the words arrive as you say them, so you can see it hearing you correctly before you commit.
A note when you press Enter
It is appended, timestamped, to a note called Murmur Inbox in your own Apple Notes. Ordinary text in an ordinary note.
Built to disappear into your desktop.
- Over everything
- The dot floats above every app and follows you across spaces and full screen. You never leave what you are doing to use it.
- ⌃⌥⌘Space
- Starts a capture from anywhere, without finding the dot first. The same keys end it.
- Stops when you pause
- Four seconds of quiet and it stops listening on its own. Click the dot again to keep going — it picks up the same note where you left it.
- Edit before saving
- The card holds the text until you say so. Fix a name, cut a sentence, then press Return. Escape throws it away.
- Murmur Inbox
- Every capture is appended with a timestamp to one note in Apple Notes, which means it is already on your phone by the time you pick it up — through iCloud Notes, the way your other notes sync.
Your words, exactly as you said them.
Speech is a private thing. Murmur is built so there is nowhere for it to go.
On your Mac, not on a server
Transcription runs through Apple’s SpeechTranscriber, on-device. Audio is held in memory only long enough to become words, and is never written to disk.
Zero network requests
Murmur opens no connections at all. No accounts, no telemetry, no update check. Turn Wi-Fi off and capture exactly as normal — that is the test, and you can watch it with Little Snitch.
Three permissions, and nothing else
Microphone, Speech Recognition, and Notes. No Accessibility, no Screen Recording — so it cannot see your screen or read your keystrokes, and it never asks to.
Sandboxed, with a way out
It runs in Apple’s sandbox. If Notes is unreachable, the capture is written to a local file instead and the card tells you where, so a thought is never lost to a failed save.
Get Murmur.
Free · 1 MB · macOS 26 Tahoe or later · Apple Silicon · Version 1.0.0