FoxSay joins the skulk

FoxSay has been on GitHub since February, first as VoiceFox and then under the name it kept, but it never had a page here. Now it does, which makes it the seventh app on skulkworks.dev. It turns up with 2.0, easily the biggest release it's had.

FoxSay is dictation that never leaves your Mac. Hold a hotkey, say what you mean, let go, and the text lands in whatever app you were already in. No cloud round trip, no account, nothing uploaded. The transcription runs on the Neural Engine using Parakeet (via FluidAudio) or Whisper (via WhisperKit), whichever you pick, and there's a history of every transcript with the audio kept behind it.

What makes it more than a transcriber is the second pass. A local AI model running on MLX tidies the raw transcript up, and you decide what "tidy" means by editing the prompt. Qwen 2.5 1.5B is the recommended model, and 2.0 brings the current generation along with it: Qwen 3.5 2B, Qwen 3 4B Instruct, Qwen 3 1.7B, Gemma 3 1B QAT, Gemma 4 E2B, LFM2 1.2B and Llama 3.2 1B. If you'd rather send it out to a remote model instead, it talks to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, with presets for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and OpenRouter.

2.0 is largely a redesign. New app icon, and the whole app rebuilt around it: one coral accent, neutral surfaces, consistent cards throughout. The recording overlay is the part you'll notice first, now three studio meters (LED Meter, Analyzer and Waveform) with much faster level metering. About moved out of its own panel into the main window, sitting next to a new Our Apps pane, and Check for Updates lives there now rather than in the app menu. On the speech side there are two new Parakeet models: TDT-CTC 110M, the smallest and fastest of them, English only, and a Japanese 0.6B that's more accurate on Japanese than the multilingual V3.

Here's where it parts company with the rest of the apps: FoxSay is free. Not free-tier free, actually free. It's Apache 2.0, the source is public, and there's no license to buy, no in-app purchase, and no trial clock ticking down. It was never on the Mac App Store either, so unlike its siblings there's no migration to do and no receipt to hunt for. Just download it and go.

It needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later and Apple silicon, since MLX and the on-device speech models don't run on Intel. Get it from the FoxSay page or with Homebrew: brew install --cask skulkworks/tap/foxsay. The source is on GitHub, and release notes live in the changelog.