Parlo

Hey IH, first post here, so a bit of context on what I'm building.

I tried a bunch of dictation apps, and separately wanted something to handle meeting notes. But the more of these point tools I stacked, the more it felt like I was patching around something bigger: the computer interface itself is starting to unlock milestones it's been stuck at for decades. Keyboard and mouse have basically been a given since the conception of the modern computer, and that's finally shifting. Not because of one clever app, but because good local ASR models, capable small LLMs, and Apple Silicon are making real-time, fully on-device processing actually possible now, not just a research demo.

Almost every dictation and meeting tool I tried wants your data in their cloud, even when it doesn't strictly need to be there for transcription to work. That's the part that concerned me on privacy grounds, on top of paying a subscription for something my own Mac is now powerful enough to do locally. Add a separate meeting-notes tool on top of a dictation app and I was paying $30+/month for three overlapping point solutions.

So I built Parlo: one app, three things, as a bundle, all on-device (ASR model and a small local LLM model, no cloud calls at runtime):

- Write, hold a key, dictate into any app, text lands instantly

- Act, hold another key, speak a command ("copy this to the desktop," "remind me to call the vet"), it just runs

- Listen, meetings get auto-detected, recorded, and turned into structured notes, no bot joining the call

It's in alpha right now (macOS 26, Apple Silicon only), and this is genuinely my first push to get it in front of people outside my own Mac.

There's a 14-day free trial. The subscription isn't about covering server costs, it's what funds continuing to evolve every part of the bundle so an on-device-first product can stay genuinely competitive with cloud-first tools built on frontier LLMs. There's also a one-time lifetime option for anyone who'd rather back it upfront than pay monthly.

If you've ever felt like your keyboard is the bottleneck between you and your computer, I'd love to know what you think, and what would make this a no-brainer for you to actually try.