Today, we are thrilled to announce the official release of Escribolt: a voice-first productivity workspace designed natively for macOS. Escribolt is not just a simple dictation shortcut—it is a complete local-first workflow layer for capturing, structuring, and conversing with your spoken thoughts.
Why Voice-First?
We think and speak much faster than we type. Keyboard input remains a significant cognitive bottleneck for brainstorming, writing first drafts, and summarizing meetings. However, raw transcriptions are often messy, disorganized, and full of verbal filler.
Escribolt bridges this gap. It captures your speech instantly, processes it using state-of-the-art AI, and converts it into structured written knowledge—without ever forcing you to compromise on speed, privacy, or ownership.
The Case for Local-First Privacy
In an era dominated by API-based cloud AI, user privacy is often treated as an afterthought. When you record sensitive team updates, customer calls, or personal journaling, that data should not live on remote databases or be used to train future public models.
Escribolt treats privacy as an architectural fact. In Local Mode, 100% of speech processing and reasoning occurs directly on your physical Mac:
- Speech-to-Text: Powered by a native Whisper.cpp implementation. It is optimized to leverage the Apple Neural Engine (ANE) on M-series chips, delivering high-speed transcription.
- Language Model (LLM): Runs local weights for Qwen-2.5-Instructnatively. We quantize the models down to 4-bit, maintaining strong reasoning capabilities while consuming less than 1.5GB of system RAM.
Three Modes Built for Choice
Escribolt accommodates different privacy, control, and convenience profiles:
- Local Mode: Absolute privacy. No internet connection required. All models and storage run on-device.
- BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) Mode: Provider flexibility. Keep your files local in SQLite, but route processing to your personal keys (Deepgram, OpenAI, Groq, Anthropic, Gemini) to swap models dynamically.
- PRO Mode: High speed and cross-device convenience. Authenticated cloud relays sync your data, while a per-item "Strict Privacy" toggle still lets you lock specific records on-device.
These modes are packaged into clear, user-centric options: the open-source Community tier is forever free for Local and BYOK modes, while our managed cloud Pioneer and Founder tiers offer high-performance cloud transcription (15 or 50 hours/month), Unlimited instant dictation, secure cross-device sync, and access to our advanced Hercules, Atlas, and Zeus reasoning models.
Four Core Workflows
Escribolt coordinates four primary capture mechanisms, accessible via macOS global shortcuts:
- Live Dictation Hotkey (Hold Fn or Fn + Space): Speak naturally and Escribolt transcribes and inserts the formatted text directly into your active window (such as Slack, VS Code, or your browser).
- Quick Notes Capture (Control+N): Low-latency idea capture. Speak a quick thought and Escribolt appends it directly to a sticky note that floats on your desktop.
- Silent Record Mode (Control+R): Captures both microphone and system audio via macOS loopback routing. Perfect for Zoom or Teams meetings without requiring intrusive bot attendees.
- Audio Imports: Drag and drop external voice memos, calls, or interviews straight into the dashboard for automatic indexing.
From Raw Audio to Structured Knowledge
Once audio is captured, Escribolt transforms it from static text into interactive knowledge:
Generate instant summaries and key action points directly from your recordings. To query your data, Escribolt features a unified Global Ask workspace tab. In Ask chats, you can dynamically reference recordings, notes, folders, and previous chats inline using the @ key (e.g. @Meeting Notes), pulling their transcripts and content directly into your AI context.
Escribolt organizes your files into custom Spaces, making it simple to group related notes and recordings. Notes are created and edited in a rich, Tiptap-powered Markdown Editor. When you are ready to share or archive, you can export your notes instantly to Markdown, PDF, or HTML formats, allowing for easy integration with external knowledge vaults like Obsidian.
Try It Today
Escribolt is designed to be the fastest, most secure bridge between human speech and structured knowledge. Download the app, select your preferred mode during onboarding, and start speaking your ideas into reality.