Installation
One universal DMG, drag to Applications, done. This page covers the requirements, the prompts macOS shows, and the older-macOS fallback.
Requirements
| Item | Requirement |
|---|---|
| macOS | 14 (Sonoma) or newer |
| Chip | Apple Silicon or Intel — one universal build covers both |
| Disk | ~40 MB for the app, plus 39 MB – 1.6 GB for the speech model you choose |
| Network | Only to download the app and its model. Dictation itself works offline. |
| Account | None. There is nothing to sign up for. |
Install from the DMG
- Download the DMG. The download page also lists the SHA-256 checksum if you want to verify it.
- Open the DMG and drag OpenVoiceFlow into Applications.
- Open the app from your Applications folder — not from the disk-image window. macOS cannot run an app from a mounted image, and this is the single most common first-run confusion.
- Click Open at the “downloaded from the Internet” prompt. You will see it exactly once.
The app is Developer-ID signed and notarized by Apple, which is why you get a simple confirmation rather than a block. Every notarized app distributed outside the App Store shows this the first time. If you instead see a hard refusal, you likely have an older unsigned copy — delete it and re-download the current build.
macOS 12–13
The current app requires macOS 14. If you are on Monterey or Ventura, the download page keeps a retained 0.3.6 Apple Silicon build available. It is end-of-life: it receives no fixes, and its defaults differ from current policy. Updating macOS to 14 is the better path where possible — every Mac that can run OpenVoiceFlow can install Sonoma.
There is no Intel fallback for macOS 12–13.
Where the app puts things
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| The app | /Applications/OpenVoiceFlow.app |
| Settings, history, dictionary, snippets, styles, profile | ~/Library/Application Support/OpenVoiceFlow/ |
| Downloaded speech models | ~/Documents/huggingface/models/argmaxinc/whisperkit-coreml/ |
| API keys (only if you enable cloud cleanup) | macOS Keychain, service app.openvoiceflow.apikeys |
Nothing is written outside your user account, and no installer scripts, kernel extensions, or background daemons are installed. Full detail in Privacy architecture; removal in Uninstalling.
Where the app lives once running
OpenVoiceFlow appears as a monochrome waveform icon in the menu bar at the top right, and by default also in the Dock (click it to open the dashboard). Prefer menu-bar only? Turn off Show in Dock in Settings.
On laptops with a notch, a crowded menu bar can hide icons entirely. The dashboard shows a banner when it detects this. Quitting a menu-bar app or two makes room.
Documentation for OpenVoiceFlow 0.5.5 · last updated 2026-07-31. Something wrong or missing here? That is a bug — tell us at shimoverse@gmail.com.