Live Voice Translation on Mac: Speak Any Language, It Writes Yours

Pick a target language once, then just talk

Translate mode flips the usual problem on its head. Instead of typing in a language you know and translating after, you speak in whatever language comes naturally and Verba writes the target. Set your target language one time in the mode, then dictate. You can talk in Spanish and get English in a Slack message, ramble in Tagalog and get a polished French email, or mix as you go. Verba transcribes your speech across roughly 99 languages on-device first, then rewrites it into your chosen target on the AI engine you control.

• Choose from 15 target languages to write into
• Speak any of ~99 recognized input languages
• Set the target once per mode, no per-sentence fiddling
• Switch to Translate with Fn plus its number, then start talking

It translates the meaning, not word for word

Machine translation that goes phrase by phrase produces text that reads like a robot wrote it. Verba's Translate mode rewrites for intent, so the output sounds like a native speaker actually composed it. It preserves your tone, whether you were casual or formal, and protects the things literal translation usually mangles: proper names stay spelled correctly, numbers and dates stay intact, and code or technical terms pass through untouched instead of getting helpfully mistranslated.

• Keeps your tone, formal or casual
• Preserves proper names exactly as said
• Leaves numbers, dates, and code alone
• Reads like native text, not a phrasebook

Where your voice and your translation actually run

Two stages, two clear privacy boundaries. The first stage, turning your speech into text, runs on-device with WhisperKit or NVIDIA Parakeet, so in on-device mode your audio never leaves the Mac. The second stage, rewriting that text into your target language, runs on the AI engine you bring: your Claude subscription through Claude Code with no key, your own Anthropic or OpenRouter key, or a fully local Ollama model. Verba never makes a billed AI call on your behalf. If you want the whole pipeline to stay on your machine, pair on-device transcription with a local Ollama model.

Pastes the translation straight into any app

The translated text lands wherever your cursor is, system-wide. There is no copy step, no intermediate window, no switching to a dedicated translation site and back. Reply to a customer in their language inside your email client, drop a translated note into Notion, answer a Slack thread in English while you think in Portuguese. Because Translate is a mode like the others, you switch into it with Fn plus a number and back out the same way, so live translation is one keystroke away in the middle of any workflow.

Built for people who think in one language and write in another

If your day involves more than one language, typing is the bottleneck. You know what you want to say, but composing it correctly in the other language is slow and second-guessed. Translate mode removes that friction: you speak the thought once and get correct, natural target-language text immediately. It is made for bilingual professionals, support and sales teams who answer in customers' languages, developers writing English commit messages from a non-English first language, and anyone tired of pasting between a translator and their real app.