Hushkey

Hushkey is a silent dictation desktop application that turns lip and jaw movements into typed text on macOS.

Hushkey is a silent dictation tool for macOS that reads your lips, jaw, and throat movements from your webcam instead of listening to your voice. When you hold a modifier key and mouth words silently, it processes the movement through a local model server and types the resulting text at your cursor in any application. The system combines a frozen Auto-AVSR conformer lip reader with LoRA adapters and a kinematic branch for motion tracking. Users can personalize the recognition by recording a set of silent prompts to train a custom adapter locally on their Mac. It runs entirely on your device with no audio recorded and no video leaving your computer, and it supports optional LLM cleanup via Ollama.

Hushkey at a glance

Best for: Software engineer
Runs on: macOS
Pricing: Free
Released: October 2026
Category: AI productivity tool
Website: github.com/amirrsyed/hushkey

Key features

Push-to-talk silent dictation using a webcam
Personalized adapter training on your own mouth movements
Local model server processing with no cloud dependency
Automatic motion detection for hands-free operation
Optional LLM cleanup via local Ollama integration
Pasted text output at the cursor with clipboard restore

Use it for

Dictating text silently in quiet environments
Entering text in any desktop application without speaking aloud
Training custom lip-reading adapters using personal video clips

Alternatives to Hushkey

Lipflow — Transcribes silent speech into text via webcam and local processing.
LocalBolo — Private, on-device dictation that works in any app without cloud data usage.
SpeechFast — Dictate anywhere on Mac with 100 percent local processing and no cloud servers.
Openbroca — AI cleanup and translation turn messy speech into ready-to-send text directly in your apps.
SpeakMore — Free and open source voice dictation for Mac.
SpeechShield — Provides answers from your resume and notes hidden from screen shares.
Blurt — Fast, native open-source dictation with server-side LLM cleanup and no subscription.
UnCode — Runs entirely on your machine without cloud services.
BetterWispr — Local models and open source design keep your speech private on your Mac.
talkflow — Transcribes speech entirely on your device with no word limits or cloud accounts
Sayso — It runs speech recognition locally on your computer with support for multiple AI models.
Talkhawk — Speech recognition runs locally on your PC so your audio never leaves your computer.

All Hushkey alternatives