Slate
Blue Tomato Studio · 2026–
Slate is a dictation app for the Mac. It turns speech into text on your own machine, so a recording of your voice never goes to a company's server.
- 0 connections to the internet while you dictate it still works with the Wi-Fi off
- 600 MB speech files, downloaded once about what fits on one CD
- 25 languages one download for English, another that covers 25 European languages
- 7.9 MB the app itself about the size of two photos from a phone
Speech becomes text on the Neural Engine. There is no server and no monthly bill.
You hold a key, talk, and let go. The words are typed at your cursor in whatever app you were already in. A few fixed rules tidy the text on the way in. They take out the ums and the stutters. If you correct yourself, they keep the correction and drop the first try. Say “new paragraph” and you get one. You can turn each rule off on its own. Your wording is never rewritten.
I built all of it on my own.
One that went wrong. Slate can update itself, and before it installs anything it checks a signature. For the first release, that signature was made before Apple notarised the app. Notarising rewrites the file, so the signature and the file size both changed afterwards. If that release had gone out, every copy of Slate would have refused every future update, and I could not have fixed it from my end. It was caught by comparing one number in the update feed against the size of the file on disk. Signing now happens after notarising, and that check is a written step in every release.