About one second from speech to text

A cartoon coral speech bubble with a big smile zooming across the page, speed lines trailing behind it

Latency

Mac
about 1s
Windows
not measured yet

Download size

Mac
3.8MB
Windows
12.1MB

Footprint

1 process

Mac
about 75MB idle
Windows
about 22MB idle

One second, in real time.

Here it is next to a heartbeat and a blink.

  • Speech to text, Mac1.0 s
  • Speech to text, Windowsnot measured yet
  • A resting heartbeat0.6–1 s
  • Launch, Mac0.15 s
  • A blink0.1–0.4 s

  • It pastes, all at once.

    Not typed out letter by letter.

  • It keeps a line open.

    Each dictation reuses one open connection: no new handshake to wait for.

  • Its own part is tiny.

    Stopping the mic, encoding and pasting take about 57 ms. The rest is the network and the model.

About the size of a few photos.

  • Mac download 3.8 MB
  • Windows download 12.1 MB
  • A phone photo about 3 MB
  • Mac, installed 8.6 MB
  • Windows Store app, installed 4.0 MB
1 square = 1 MB

  • Native on both.

    Swift on the Mac, Rust on Windows. No browser engine inside.

  • No models to download.

    Transcription runs on MAI-Transcribe 2 in the cloud.

A cartoon coral speech bubble floating happily beside a light pink feather

Idle means idle.

When you aren’t dictating, nothing runs but a once-a-day update check. No audio.

A cartoon coral speech bubble napping peacefully on a soft pink cushion
One process, on Mac and on Windows. No helpers beside it.
~75 MB on Mac. ~22 MB on Windows. One square is 75 MB; 218 of them make 16 GB.
~0.007% CPU on Mac. ~0% on Windows. Each dot is 0.01% of a core, and blabe uses less than one.

Accurate, too.

Transcription Microsoft ranks #1 on FLEURS.

Try blabe free for 2 days.

No card, no email, no signup. macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon or Intel, or Windows 11 on an x64 PC. See how blabe and Wispr Flow differ on size, price and privacy.

Download blabe See pricing
How we measured
  1. Versions and machines. Mac: blabe 1.0.21 on a MacBook Air (M4, 16 GB) with macOS 26.6.2. Windows: blabe 1.0.4 from the Microsoft Store on a desktop PC (AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, 32 GB) with Windows 11 Pro 25H2. Both measured on 2026-10-14. Footprint figures are medians of three runs; each idle run lasted five minutes with nothing dictated. The numbers on the home page are the Mac ones.
  2. Speech to text is the time from the end of recording to pasted text. Across 43 real dictations in the Mac app, with AI cleanup on, it was 1.0 s at the median (p50) and 1.75 s at p95. AI cleanup: Aggressive, Standard or Off. Aggressive is the default for new installs. Updating keeps the setting you had. With AI cleanup off, the clip-length estimates below are lower. Windows: not measured yet. Results vary with your network and region.
    By clip length (Mac): estimated time from the end of recording to pasted text, p50 / p95. API harness over Wi-Fi, 10 runs a cell.
    Clip AI cleanup off AI cleanup on
    3 s 450 / 495 ms 625 / 1,225 ms
    10 s 510 / 915 ms 705 / 920 ms
    30 s 780 / 855 ms 1,005 / 1,660 ms
    Where the time goes on a Mac: auth about 95 ms; upload 50–67 ms; transcription 190 ms for a 3 s clip, 250 ms for 10 s and 480 ms for 30 s; AI cleanup, when on, another 175–225 ms; the app’s own work (stopping the mic, encoding, pasting) about 57 ms. The clip-length figures are estimates: clips made with macOS say, sent through an API harness that mirrors the app’s request path. The everyday figures are 43 dictations made in the Mac app during normal use. Each dictation reused an open connection; a new one adds about 150 ms once.
  3. Download and installed size. Mac (blabe 1.0.23): the DMG is 3,808,651 bytes (3.81 MB); the app bundle takes 8,646,656 bytes on disk (8.65 MB). Windows: the installer from the download page (blabe 1.0.7) is 12,134,458 bytes (12.1 MB). The Microsoft Store package is 2,002,080 bytes (2.0 MB); installed, its files are 3,841,656 bytes, or 3,997,696 bytes (4.0 MB) with each file rounded up to the disk’s 4 KiB clusters, which is how the Mac figure counts. MB means 1,000,000 bytes and MiB 1,048,576.
  4. Launch on a Mac is 0.15 s from a fresh process to startup complete, with warm caches, not the time until you can dictate. On Windows we timed something else, from the launch request to the app’s window (0.25 s), so it isn’t shown beside the Mac figure.
  5. Footprint. One app process on each, checked every few seconds; no helper processes were seen. Idle memory: on the Mac, 74.97 MiB of resident memory (RSS), rounded to about 75 MB; on Windows, a 21.67 MiB working set (3.37 MiB of it private), about 22 MB. Background work: the only scheduled work is the automatic update check, at most once a day. The Windows download (from 1.0.6) arms one timer that fires a minute after launch and then hourly, and checks only once a day has passed; the Mac app checks at most once a day; the Microsoft Store copy doesn’t check by itself. A check fetches blabe.dev’s update feed and, if there’s a newer version, may download it. It sends version numbers and no account or device ID.
  6. CPU at idle. Mac: 0.00696% of one core, about 0.007%, averaged over five minutes. Windows counts CPU time in 15.6 ms ticks: two of three five-minute runs used none, and the third used one tick, about 0.005% of one core. On the Mac, Activity Monitor’s Energy Impact read 0.0, a rounded score rather than zero energy.
  7. Accuracy. MAI-Transcribe 2 ranks #1 on FLEURS at 5.2% average word error rate (WER) across 60 languages, according to Microsoft’s announcement. On the Artificial Analysis speech-to-text leaderboard (checked 2026-10-14) it is #3 on word error rate at 2.0%.
  8. The comparisons. A blink lasts 0.1–0.4 s (BioNumbers). An adult’s resting heart rate is 60 to 100 beats a minute (MedlinePlus), so one beat takes 0.6–1 s. A phone photo is usually a few megabytes; we use about 3 MB. The memory squares split 16 GB, the memory in the Mac we measured on, into 218 squares of about 75 MB; Windows is drawn as part of one. The CPU grid is 1% of one core in 100 dots; zoomed out, it’s the whole core in 10,000, with that 1% outlined.