A study tool that lives in your Mac's menu bar. You talk to it, it writes down what you said. It turns your lessons into notes, your notes into quizzes, and your Canvas classes into a picture of what's due and how ready you are.
It does not write your assignments. It will grade a draft against your teacher's rubric and tell you what to fix, but the writing is yours.
Speech never leaves your Mac. The "AI" part uses a ChatGPT or Claude account you already have. Nothing to pay for.
| You do | It does |
|---|---|
| Press ⌥R, talk, press ⌥R again | Turns what you said into clean text and shows it in the menu bar. As you type it into Google Docs, the next letter lights up and follows you. Spelling mistake? Hit space and it moves to the next word. |
| Press ⌥N | Study notes for whatever test or assignment is next in your class, built from the actual unit pages and PDFs in Canvas. |
| Press ⌥G while in a doc | Grades your document with the teacher's rubric from Canvas, tells you what to fix. |
| Press ⌥E on any page | Reads the page you're on. Assignment page → what it's asking for and what you'll be marked on. Essay already there → a ten-word verdict and the rubric breakdown, with the three things to fix. |
| Press ⌥C when class starts, again when it ends | Records the whole class, writes neat notes, and pulls out the homework and test dates the teacher mentioned. ⌥P pastes the notes anywhere. |
| Nothing | Every morning it writes a 5-minute brief: what's due today and tomorrow, and the exact pages to review if there's a quiz. |
| Look at the bar | 📌 next assignment · 📝 what the teacher asked for in class · ⏭ your next class and minutes left. |
| Press ⌥O or click the mic | Opens the app, in four sections: Today (actions, morning brief, schedule), Canvas (dashboard, assignments, courses), Your work (class notes, suggestions, history) and Setup. |
| Open Canvas → Dashboard | Your grade in each class, what's missing or overdue, what's due this week, and what just came back graded — pulled from your own Canvas account. |
You need: a Mac on macOS 14 or newer, and either the Codex app signed in with your ChatGPT account, or Claude Code signed in with your Claude account.
- Open Terminal (press ⌘Space, type
Terminal, Enter). - Paste this and press Enter. It installs Apple's free developer tools if you don't have them (a dialog may pop up — click Install, then wait):
xcode-select --install
- Paste this and press Enter. It installs Homebrew, a tool that installs other tools:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" - Paste this and press Enter. It downloads DictateBar, builds it, and opens it:
git clone https://github.com/dogeking69/DictateBar.git ~/DictateBar && cd ~/DictateBar && scripts/build_app.sh
- A Set up DictateBar window appears. Go down the list — each row has a button:
- Speech recognition → Install with Homebrew (1–3 min)
- Speech model → Download (150 MB)
- AI → pick Codex or Claude → Test. If it says not signed in: open the Codex app and log in (or run
claude auth loginin Terminal). - Canvas → paste your school's Canvas address and a token. To get a token: Canvas → your picture → Settings → scroll to Approved Integrations → + New Access Token → Generate → copy. Then Save & sync courses.
- Microphone / Accessibility / Calendar → Allow. Accessibility opens System Settings — flip the switch next to DictateBar.
- In Chrome, turn on View → Developer → Allow JavaScript from Apple Events. This lets ⌥E read Canvas pages without touching your clipboard. (Google Docs works either way — Docs draws its text in a way JavaScript can't read, so those use copy instead.)
- Click the mic icon in the menu bar → Settings → choose your class → done.
Press ⌥R and say something.
Click the mic → Schedule:
- Type your school's name and state → Look up calendar & bell schedule. It searches the web for your no-school days and period times.
- Pick Today is Day … (your rotation day). You only do this once; it counts forward from there.
- Edit which class is in each period and pick your classes from the grid. Or Import my timetable PDF.
Now the bar shows your next class, you get a ping 5 minutes before each one, and recording a class files itself under the right course automatically.
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| ⌥R | record / stop |
| ⌥V | use copied text as the request |
| ⌥N | notes for the next test/assignment |
| ⌥G | grade the document I'm in |
| ⌥E | write or revise the page I'm on |
| ⌥C | record class / stop |
| ⌥P | paste class notes |
| ⌥J / ⌥D | next suggestion / mark done |
| ⌥Space | pause following my typing |
| ⌥H | hide / show the bar |
| ⌥← ⌥→ ⌥↑ ⌥↓ | move by word / sentence |
| ⌥O | open the app |
⌥← / ⌥→ normally jump words in text editors. If you miss that, switch the modifier to Control+Option in Settings.
Set Settings → Spoken language to Spanish and DictateBar downloads and uses a
multilingual speech model. The English-only model it ships with cannot hear Spanish
at all — given Hoy vamos a repasar los verbos reflexivos it returns
Hoi vamos aripeza los verboz repolixívos. The small model is used for
non-English because base garbles most of a classroom sentence.
If your schedule knows you are in Spanish right now, a class recording (⌥C) is transcribed as Spanish automatically — no setting to remember.
Accents work in language classes. ⌥E and ⌥N are how a Mac types á é í ó ú and ñ, and they are normally DictateBar shortcuts. During a language class the app stands those two down so the accents reach your document; the menu says so while it is on. Every other shortcut is unchanged.
Audio is a working file, never a stored one. Recording a class picks up your teacher and the people around you, and none of them agreed to be recorded. The sound is turned into text on your Mac and the file is deleted straight after — including when the transcription fails, and any audio left over from a crash is cleared the next time the app starts. The Today page shows how many audio files are on disk (it should say none) with a Delete now button if it ever says otherwise.
The written notes and transcripts of a recorded class are kept, in
~/Documents/DictateBar/library/classes/, because that is the point of the feature.
Delete that folder whenever you want.
Everything is in ~/Documents/DictateBar — your synced Canvas material, class notes, briefs, and a history.log of every AI run. Your Canvas token sits in .env there. Nothing is uploaded anywhere except to the AI you chose, and it only sees your library folder read-only.
Click the mic → Appearance: colours, font, size, background. The AI's instructions are plain text in the prompts/ folder — edit them if you want a different voice or format.
- Click the mic → History to see what the AI got and what it answered.
- Mic menu → Setup… re-checks everything.
- Recording says "whisper failed"? Setup → Speech model → Download again.
- Bar disappeared? ⌥H.
Two things here are worth thinking about before you use them.
Recording a class. It records your teacher and everyone near you, none of whom chose to be recorded. New York is a one-party-consent state so it is lawful, but school policy is a separate question and many districts expect you to ask first. DictateBar asks you, once per course, whether you have — and the audio is deleted as soon as it becomes text, so there is no recording of anyone to leak or share.
Having it write an assignment. It won't. That was taken out deliberately: DictateBar transcribes what you say, makes notes and quizzes from your own lessons, and grades a draft against the rubric — but it will not produce prose for you to hand in, and it will not type for you. Ask it to write your essay and it says no.
If a teacher asks what this is, the honest description is: it transcribes lessons into notes on your own Mac, pulls your Canvas assignments and rubrics together, makes quizzes and study guides from them, and gives rubric feedback on drafts you wrote yourself. No audio is kept, it does not write assignments, and nothing is uploaded except the text you ask it to work on.
This grades and explains schoolwork; it does not write it. What you hand in is still your own work and your own responsibility, and your school's rules apply.
MIT licensed. Built with whisper.cpp, Codex CLI / Claude Code, Swift.