Install Phantom Voice

Get the current build from leftinverse.com/phantom. Past builds are listed on the downloads page.

You get a 14-day full trial before you buy anything.

Drag Phantom Voice into your Applications folder and launch it from there.

This is not a style preference. macOS ties granted permissions to the app's location. If you run it from your Downloads folder or from the mounted disk image, macOS will forget the permissions you granted and ask again.

On first run the app asks for Microphone, Accessibility and Input Monitoring. Each one covers a different part of the loop, and dictation is incomplete without all three. See Permissions Explained for what each one does.

The first run downloads a whisper.cpp model. Large v3 Turbo is the recommended default. Lighter options are available if you would rather trade some accuracy for size and speed, covered in Choose a Speech Model.

This download happens once. After it finishes, dictation works offline.

Put your cursor in any text field, hold fn, say a sentence, and release. Walk through it in detail in Your First Dictation.