Chirp is completely free. Every release below is signed, notarised on macOS, and available for both desktops.
1.2.0
Permissions are the first thing Chirp asks for and they have been the least reliable thing about it. Three separate faults were behind that, and this release fixes all three.
Permissions
Granting access now works immediately. Chirp built its keyboard hooks once at launch — which, on a new install, is before onboarding has asked for Accessibility. They failed, nothing ever rebuilt them, and granting access afterwards turned every checkbox green while the hotkey stayed dead until you quit and reopened. Pasting kept working the whole time, so nothing looked wrong.
Building Chirp locally no longer breaks the installed copy's permission. macOS ties Accessibility to an app's signature. A local build and a released build are signed differently, so sharing one identity meant each silently invalidated the other's permission — leaving the switch on in System Settings and nothing working. Local builds now have their own identity.
When a permission has gone stale, Chirp says what actually fixes it. It used to suggest switching the toggle off and on, which does not work: macOS keeps the old signature until the entry is removed with the − button and Chirp is added again. That is what it now tells you, with a button to reveal Chirp in Finder so you can drag it back.
Denied Automation and Input Monitoring permissions are named instead of failing silently. Both are separate from Accessibility, in their own panes, and nothing previously mentioned either.
Uninstalling
Chirp can now uninstall itself, from Settings → Access. It clears its permissions, deletes your data and saved keys, removes every downloaded model, and moves itself to the Trash.
Doing it this way matters: macOS runs no part of an app when you drag it to the Trash, and it never removes the Accessibility entry on its own. Uninstalling from inside Chirp is the only moment those permissions can still be cleared.
Parakeet models are removed too. They live outside Chirp's own folder, so nothing had ever deleted them — they survived a full reinstall.
Fixes
The engine you download during onboarding is the engine Chirp uses. It was being saved somewhere nothing read, so setup finished with a downloaded model and none selected, and you had to go to Settings and pick it again. Anyone already in that state is repaired on upgrade.
Updating itself is the thing Chirp has to get right before anything else, so this release is mostly about that — plus the polish it turned up along the way.
Updating
The update prompt appears once. It used to open two identical Software Update windows stacked on top of each other on every daily check.
Skip This Version and Later now close the window. Both buttons previously did their job and left the dialog on screen.
Release notes read as release notes. Headings are headings, bullets are bullets, and a bullet that wraps across lines is one bullet again instead of one per line.
On Windows the download shows real progress and transfer size rather than an indeterminate bar that was indistinguishable from a hang.
On Windows the prompt brings Chirp to the front. Closed to the tray, the notification used to be shown into a hidden window, where nobody saw it and it blocked every later check.
macOS in-app updates would have been impossible. The updater required releases to be signed by a team that is not the one on the signing certificate, so every update would have been refused as "signed by an unexpected developer" — and no later release could have fixed it, because no later release could have been installed. The release now fails if the artifact does not satisfy the requirement the updater enforces.
A signed copy of Chirp now installs only updates signed by the same publisher, on Windows as well as macOS. Nothing about the downloaded installer was checked before it was run.
Version comparison is numeric. 1.2 and 1.2.0 are the same release, and a pre-release tag no longer outranks the build it precedes — either of which could offer an update to the version already installed, on every check.
Check for Updates now answers on macOS. Finding nothing was completely silent, so a successful check, a failed one, and "already current" all looked the same.
A failed check no longer counts as a check, so being offline at the wrong moment does not cost a day of updates.
Cancelled and rejected downloads clean up after themselves instead of leaving installers in the temporary directory forever.
Fixes
The recorder overlay no longer fails to build against the system logger — a regression that broke the macOS build outright.
The macOS build now proves its window actually paints. Releases were verified by launching the packaged app and checking the process existed, which a window that renders nothing but its background passes — the same failure the Windows build has asserted against for a while, and which macOS had no guard for.
Scrolling is smoother in History, Insights, and the dashboard's recent transcriptions. Each was constructing a date formatter — one of the most expensive objects in Foundation — inside the view body, per row, per frame.
The first public release. Chirp is completely free, with no subscription and no account.
Dictate anywhere
Hold a configurable shortcut, speak, and release. Chirp transcribes and types the result into whichever app you were already using.
macOS and Windows builds are native — SwiftUI and WinUI 3, not a web wrapper on either platform.
Private by default
Whisper and Parakeet models run locally, through Core ML on macOS and natively on Windows. No transcript leaves the machine unless you connect a cloud provider yourself.
History and usage data stay on disk locally. Provider API keys are held in the macOS Keychain or Windows Credential Manager.
Make it yours
Dictionary rules, text snippets, language selection, and optional cleanup modes shape the words Chirp returns.
Import audio files, search local history, replay saved recordings, and export plain text.
Installers
The macOS DMG and PKG are signed with a Developer ID certificate, built with the hardened runtime and a trusted timestamp, notarised by Apple, and stapled.
The Windows Setup EXE is not yet signed with a trusted publisher certificate, so SmartScreen will warn on first run.
Requirements
macOS 14 or later, Apple Silicon or Intel.
Windows 11 21H2 or later, x64 or ARM64.
Microphone access, plus Accessibility permission on macOS.
