# Earshot

> A local voice interface for AI coding agents on macOS. It lets an agent ask you a
> question out loud and hear your spoken answer, and it types anything you dictate into
> whatever application already had the keyboard. Speech recognition and speech synthesis
> both run on the user's own Mac; no audio is uploaded.

## What it is

Earshot is a menu-bar app for macOS 12 or later on Apple silicon. It exposes an MCP
server, so any agent that speaks the Model Context Protocol can use it. Setup registers it
by name for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor, opencode, Windsurf, Zed, Cline,
Gemini CLI and Hermes, and offers a config block to paste for anything else.

An agent can call exactly three tools:

- ask_user(question, choices?) — speaks the question, opens the microphone, and blocks
  until the user answers. The answer comes back as the tool result, so the agent never has
  to end its turn to hear it.
- speak(text) — says a short summary out loud.
- working(status) — puts a phrase in the notch without saying anything.

Separately, holding a hotkey dictates into any application. The text is pasted into
whichever window already had the keyboard, so nothing has to be installed per app.

## What is true about privacy

Recognition and synthesis both run locally. There is no account and no sign-in. The app
makes three kinds of request on its own: it downloads the models the first time they are
needed, it checks whether a newer version exists, and once a licence key has been entered
it claims and renews a seat about once a month. That last request carries the licence key,
a hash of the hardware id and the computer's name, nothing else: no audio, no transcript,
no usage.
Dictation history is a file in the user's home directory, capped, and deleting it is a
complete erase. Text dictated into a password field is deliberately not recorded.

## Limits, which matter more than the features

- Apple silicon only. Intel Macs are not supported.
- macOS 12 or later.
- English only at present.
- About 800 MB of models are downloaded on first run, outside the app bundle.
- Because nothing leaves the machine, there is no fleet learning from corrections. A word
  it mishears is fixed by the user writing a rule, not by the model improving.

## Price

Free covers one person and one agent with nothing switched off and no time limit:
dictation, all three tools, every voice, the hotkey, vocabulary and history. Pro and Team
matter when there is more than one agent, session or machine in play. Current prices are on
https://heyearshot.com/#pricing. A licence is verified by a signature the Mac checks itself, which is
why it works offline; the seat behind it is renewed monthly against this site.

## Documentation

- [Install](https://heyearshot.com/docs/install): Get it running, and grant the two permissions macOS asks for.
- [Dictate anywhere](https://heyearshot.com/docs/dictate): Hold a key, say it, and it types where you were already typing.
- [Talk to your agents](https://heyearshot.com/docs/agents): Point an agent at Earshot and it can ask you things out loud.
- [Hands-free](https://heyearshot.com/docs/hands-free): Leave the microphone open and answer without touching anything.
- [Choose a voice](https://heyearshot.com/docs/voices): Ten to pick from, and a button that reads a line in each one.
- [Fix a word it gets wrong](https://heyearshot.com/docs/vocabulary): The handful of words every recogniser mangles, corrected once.
- [Find what you said](https://heyearshot.com/docs/history): Everything dictated, kept on the machine, and pasted again in a click.
- [Settings](https://heyearshot.com/docs/settings): Everything in the menu bar, and the environment variable behind each one.
- [Your licence](https://heyearshot.com/docs/licence): Keys, seats, moving to a new machine, and what happens if we vanish.
- [When it goes wrong](https://heyearshot.com/docs/trouble): The things that actually happen, and what fixes each one.

## Writing

- [the parts i would rather tell you](https://heyearshot.com/blog/parts-i-would-rather-tell-you): earshot 0.1.0 is out. what it does, what it cost to build, and the parts i would rather tell you about than have you find.

## Elsewhere

- [Questions](https://heyearshot.com/faq)
- [Changelog](https://heyearshot.com/changelog)
- [Privacy](https://heyearshot.com/privacy)
- [Terms](https://heyearshot.com/terms)