Yaps
Private on-device dictation, meetings and notes — voice typing and transcription that never leaves your machine.
Yaps is the most complete private-by-default voice stack we've reviewed: ~300ms system-wide dictation, meetings with speaker ID, and a Markdown vault you own. Pro at $12/month billed annually is fair for unlimited desktop dictation, transcription and video captioning, and Free on Android/iPhone/iPad with no account is unusually generous. Skip it if your team needs shared permissions and hosted AI — that's an Otter.ai or Notion AI job.
Verified 3d ago · liveness 79/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/yaps
- Solo privacy-first writers and knowledge workers who dictate drafts
- Clinicians, lawyers and journalists transcribing sensitive recordings
- Developers wanting private voice input plus agent access to their notes
- Students who want free on-device mobile dictation (50% off first year of Pro with a .edu email)
- Teams needing shared note permissions or real-time collaborative editing
- Workflows that depend on automatic cloud sync of notes across many devices
- Linux users who specifically need speaker identification in meeting transcripts
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Skip Yaps if your team needs shared notes, permissions and real-time co-editing, or if you want someone else's cloud doing the AI work rather than your own machine.
Free is mobile-only — the moment you want Mac, Windows or Linux dictation you're on Pro at $12/month billed annually or $15/month month-to-month.
Yaps Free is genuinely usable on Android, iPhone and iPad with no account, which undercuts most freemium voice tools that paywall mobile. Pro at $12/month billed annually ($15/month month-to-month) sits below a stacked Otter.ai + ElevenLabs subscription for solo users, and includes transcription, 18 read-aloud voices, captions and image generation. Enterprise is custom for teams needing volume licensing and centralized billing, not a comparable feature tier to Notion AI's per-seat pricing.
In short
Yaps — Private on-device dictation, meetings and notes — voice typing and transcription that never leaves your machine. Best for Solo privacy-first writers and knowledge workers who dictate drafts, Clinicians, lawyers and journalists transcribing sensitive recordings, Developers wanting private voice input plus agent access to their notes. Free to start; paid plans from $12/mo.
What's new in Yaps
Checked 2 days agoAcross the latest 5 updates: 2 feature updates, 1 launch and 2 news mentions.
Yaps journal Issue 01: 209 entries on local voice tools
Yaps published its September journal issue, including a guide to running Hugging Face speech, alignment, diarization and image models locally inside Yaps.
Yaps guide: how to dictate in Gmail on desktop, iPhone and Android
Yaps explains that Google Voice typing is a Docs feature rather than a Gmail one, and walks through desktop, iPhone and Android dictation options.
Yaps for iPhone and iPad
Yaps v1.0 launched on the App Store as a voice keyboard that types into any app, with on-device speech recognition, cleanup and read-aloud plus optional desktop note sync and guest mode.
Yaps Plugins & Notes Browsing
v2.3.10 shipped 11 plugins for ChatGPT Desktop, Claude Code and Codex, running against the Yaps engine on your machine, plus Finder-style folder browsing and a flat list view in notes.
Meetings, Inside Studio
v2.2.0 moved Meetings into Studio so recordings, transcripts and read-aloud share one workspace, adding guided import with synced review, video-file import, complete exports and speaker editing.
What people actually say about Yaps — is it worth it?
We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.
5 mentions across 4 sources (Hacker News, YouTube, Product Hunt, Lemmy), 65 more we could not attribute · researched Oct 18, 2026.
Weighted by the 70 posts each of 4 sources contributed.
- +Everything stays on-device — a real differentiator for legal, medical and confidential work
- +Roughly 300ms dictation latency claimed, competitive with cloud tools if it holds
- +Phone and tablet apps are free forever with no account or card required
- +Broad suite: meetings, notes, translation, captions, image gen and PDF utilities in one app
- +Voice notes are plain Markdown in a vault you own, with wiki-links and cited Q&A
- −Almost no independent user reviews to validate accuracy, stability or support claims
- −Product Hunt launch drew only 10 upvotes — barely any community traction to learn from
- −Desktop workflows locked behind Pro after just a seven-day trial
- −No shared workspaces or cloud intelligence, so team collaboration is off the table
- −Name collides with OSS 'Yap', making research and word-of-mouth unreliable
- • Local models must be downloaded once — expect multi-GB disk and bandwidth the first run
- • No cloud means your own hardware and storage become the ongoing cost
- • Seven-day desktop trial is short relative to the setup and download time
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Yaps? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →Key Features
- On-device speech-to-text dictation with roughly 300ms latency
- System-wide voice typing via hotkey on macOS, Windows and Linux
- iPhone and iPad voice keyboard that types into any app, on-device
- Meetings recording with transcripts and drafted notes inside Studio
- Speaker identification in transcripts on Windows and macOS
- Voice notes stored as plain Markdown with [[wiki-links]]
- Ask your notes natural-language questions with citations to source notes
- Handwriting to notes: photograph a page, get typed text in your vault
- Documents to audio read-aloud in 31 languages
- On-device image generation from a text prompt
- Auto captions editor with SRT export
- Translation of notes, selected text and subtitle files (28 Standard / 53 Extended languages)
- Utilities: PDF to Markdown, audio cleaner, subtitle generator, auto dead-air cut
- 11 plugins for ChatGPT Desktop, Claude Code and Codex, plus agent access to your vault
- Save to Yaps Chrome extension for saving any web page
About Yaps
Yaps is a local-first AI productivity app that turns speech into text without shipping your audio to anyone else's servers. It runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android — install it, pull down the local models once, and dictation lands in any app at roughly 300ms latency. On phones and tablets Yaps is free forever with no account or card required; on desktop you get a 7-day trial and then Pro. The core is dictation, but the suite has grown well past it. Meetings records a call on your own machine with no bot joining the room, transcribes it, works out who said what, and drafts notes you can edit — all inside Studio, where recordings, transcripts and read-aloud now share one workspace. Voice notes live as plain Markdown in a vault you own, with [[wiki-links]] and natural-language Q&A that cites the notes it pulled from. Handwriting becomes typed notes from a photo, documents become audio in 31 languages, and there's on-device image generation, translation in 28 Standard / 53 Extended languages, an auto captions editor, plus smaller utilities like PDF-to-Markdown, audio cleanup and dead-air cutting. v2.3.10 added 11 plugins for ChatGPT Desktop, Claude Code and Codex that run against the Yaps engine on your own hardware, and agent access exposes your vault to the AI tools you already use. The deliberate tradeoff: no shared workspaces, no cloud intelligence, and the desktop workflows sit behind Pro. Pro is $12/month billed annually ($144/year) or $15/month month-to-month, and verified .edu students get 50% off the first year. Against Otter.ai, Notion AI or Granola, the pitch isn't better summarization — it's that nothing leaves the device. Pick Yaps when confidentiality is the constraint; pick a cloud suite when collaboration is.
Behind the Verdict
We'd reach for Yaps when the recording itself is the risk. Calls with a source, a patient note, a legal intake — anything you'd rather not upload. The desktop app records locally, no bot joins the meeting, and Studio holds the transcript, speaker edits and read-aloud in one place. That combination is rare. Most tools in this category either charge per transcription minute or quietly route audio through a server. The vault is the second reason. Notes land as plain Markdown with [[wiki-links]], so asking a question gets you an answer with citations back to the notes it used — not an open-web guess. If you already live in Obsidian or a folder of .md files, Yaps slots in rather than demanding a migration. Where it bites: solo. No shared workspaces, no real-time co-editing, no permissions. If two people need to annotate the same transcript, this is the wrong aisle. Cross-device sync exists for notes on Pro, but it isn't the always-on cloud sync people expect from Notion. Desktop is also paywalled after a 7-day trial. Free is genuinely usable — mobile voice typing, voice notes with local search, four read-aloud voices, no account — but it's mobile only. If you dictate a few times a month on a laptop, $144/year is hard to justify; if you dictate daily, it pays for itself in a week. Closest alternative is Otter.ai for teams, and Apple's built-in Dictation for zero-cost basics. Yaps wins on privacy and output ownership; it loses on collaboration and hosted intelligence. That's the trade, and it's a deliberate one. The 11 plugins (v2.3.10) matter more than they sound. Voice input into ChatGPT Desktop, Claude Code and Codex running against your own engine means you can stay in a coding agent all day and never think about where the transcription happened. Watch the
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Yaps actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Installs Yaps for Mac, downloads local models once, then holds a hotkey to dictate draft paragraphs directly into their writing app; the cleanup step strips filler words before text lands.
Outcome: First draft dictated at roughly 300ms latency with no audio leaving the laptop, and the draft saved into a Markdown vault they can query later.
Records the call on the laptop on Windows or macOS, lets Meetings transcribe with speaker identification, then edits the fragmented speaker labels in Studio and exports the transcript.
Outcome: A speaker-labelled transcript and drafted notes without a meeting bot joining the call and without uploading the audio to a cloud service.
Uses the free Android voice keyboard to type notes in any app during a lecture, then imports the lecture audio file for on-device transcription (Free covers voice typing and notes; file transcription and desktop workflows need Pro).
Outcome: Searchable local notes with no account, no card, and no lecture audio sent to a third-party server.
Use Cases
- Dictate emails, docs and meeting notes into any desktop app without breaking your flow.
- Type by voice into any app on iPhone, iPad or Android with the on-device keyboard.
- Record a client call on your own machine — no meeting bot — and leave with speaker-labelled notes.
- Photograph handwritten pages and get typed, searchable notes in your Markdown vault.
- Ask your own note archive a question and get an answer with citations back to the notes used.
- Generate captions for a video with word-level highlighting and export them as SRT.
- Listen to a PDF or ebook read aloud in one of 31 languages, offline.
- Translate notes or subtitle files on-device while keeping the original structure.
Models Under the Hood
as of 2026-10-18
Limitations
- Yaps runs its dictation, cleanup, read-aloud and notes processing on your own device after local models have been downloaded, with offline use (including airplane mode) supported for core workflows.
- Some capabilities are platform-limited: voice cloning requires a supported Apple Silicon Mac, speaker identification is Windows and macOS only, and the Free plan is mobile-only (Android, iPhone, iPad) while desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux require Yaps Pro at $12/month billed annually ($144/year) or $15/month month-to-month after a 7-day trial, with custom Enterprise pricing for teams.
- Notes sync between mobile and desktop is optional and stays off unless the devices are paired.
- Account features and billing require an internet connection.
as of 2026-10-08
Verification history
We have re-verified Yaps 10 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
Showing the 6 most recent of 10 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Yaps tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Free
$0/forever
Ideal for
Phone-first users on Android, iPhone or iPad who want private voice typing and notes with no account, card or trial clock.
What this tier adds
Free entry point: mobile only, with voice typing, voice notes and read-aloud in 2 mobile voices running on-device.
Yaps Pro
$12/month billed annually ($144/year)
Enterprise
Custom
Ideal for
Organizations rolling Yaps out across many machines and needing centralized billing and private onboarding rather than a shared workspace.
What this tier adds
Adds priority support, volume licensing and centralized billing, and private onboarding with on-device processing as the default on team machines.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Yaps's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Yaps Free is genuinely usable on Android, iPhone and iPad with no account, which undercuts most freemium voice tools that paywall mobile. Pro at $12/month billed annually ($15/month month-to-month) sits below a stacked Otter.ai + ElevenLabs subscription for solo users, and includes transcription, 18 read-aloud voices, captions and image generation. Enterprise is custom for teams needing volume licensing and centralized billing, not a comparable feature tier to Notion AI's per-seat pricing.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Yaps — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
Mobile (iPhone, iPad, Android): install and start typing in minutes — Free needs no account or card. Desktop: install the app, run the first-run model download, and you're dictating at roughly 300ms in about 1-2 hours on typical hardware; the 7-day Pro trial starts at install. Enterprise onboarding is arranged privately with the vendor.
Switching to or from Yaps
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From Otter.ai: export your transcripts, then keep them alongside your new Yaps vault notes rather than importing them into a shared workspace Yaps doesn't have.
- →From a cloud dictation app: install Yaps desktop, claim the 7-day Pro trial, and set your dictation hotkey before disabling the old tool so you can compare accuracy on your own recordings.
- →From Obsidian or another Markdown vault: point Yaps at your existing folder structure — notes stay plain Markdown with [[wiki-links]], so nothing needs converting.
- →From phone-only voice typing: install Yaps Free on Android, iPhone or iPad with no account, then upgrade to Pro ($12/month billed annually or $15/month monthly) only when you want the desktop apps.
- ↗To Otter.ai or Notion AI: export your Yaps vault as Markdown and upload the transcripts you want indexed, accepting that your new workspace is cloud-hosted.
- ↗To a plain Markdown editor: your Yaps notes are already Markdown with [[wiki-links]], so copy the vault folder and open it in any Markdown tool.
- ↗To separate specialist tools: export captions as SRT, transcripts as text, and audio read-aloud renders as audio files, then rebuild the pipeline across dedicated apps.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “Yaps”, and we withheld 6: 6 could not be judged, because “Yaps” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about Yaps.
Official links
Tools that pair well with Yaps
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Yaps, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
inFin
inFin is an Apple-only AI voice note app with unlimited on-device recording and live Chinese-English transcription and translation.
Monologue
Monologue is Apple-only voice dictation that writes what you meant in any app, then turns notes into context your AI agents can use.
Krisp Voice AI
Krisp Voice AI cancels call noise at the system level, converts accents in real time, and takes bot-free meeting notes.
Featured Head-to-Head Comparisons
Yaps vs Gem
Gem and Yaps serve completely different needs. For recruiting teams that want an all-in-one ATS/CRM with AI agents, Gem is unmatched. For individual knowledge workers who value privacy and speed of voice input, Yaps is a game-changer. They are not competitors, but if you need a recruiter’s tool and a personal voice assistant, you could use both.
Yaps vs Poke Interaction Co
Choose Yaps if you need fast, offline voice dictation and a private second brain for writing and note-taking. Choose Poke if you want an AI assistant that manages email, calendar, and tasks from your messaging apps. They solve different problems—Yaps is a voice-first productivity tool for individuals; Poke is a chat-based automation assistant for busy professionals.
Yaps vs Guesty
If you manage vacation rentals and need AI automation across channels, pricing, and operations, Guesty is the clear choice. If you're a writer, developer, or knowledge worker who wants a privacy-first voice assistant to dictate, clip web pages, and query your notes offline, Yaps wins. These tools serve completely different needs — pick based on your primary workflow.
Alternatives to Yaps
View all
inFin
inFin is an Apple-only AI voice note app with unlimited on-device recording and live Chinese-English transcription and translation.
Monologue
Monologue is Apple-only voice dictation that writes what you meant in any app, then turns notes into context your AI agents can use.
Krisp Voice AI
Krisp Voice AI cancels call noise at the system level, converts accents in real time, and takes bot-free meeting notes.
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