Install Murmurtale on your Mac

Installing

Murmurtale is in active pre-release. During the beta, you install it from the signed build your invitation points you to, or by building it from source with the steps in the project README. A notarized one-click download is part of the 1.0 release and is not published yet — this page will name the download the moment it exists.

Screenshot arrives with the release build The install window showing the Murmurtale app icon beside the Applications folder.

Drag Murmurtale into your Applications folder, then launch it from there.

Run it from ApplicationsAlways launch Murmurtale from your Applications folder (Spotlight, Launchpad, or the Dock) — not from a Downloads or project folder. macOS can run an app opened from certain synced folders as a frozen read-only copy, which makes updates look like they did not take. Applications avoids that entirely.

What happens on first launch

The first time you open Murmurtale, it downloads its on-device speech model (about 632 MB) and compiles it for your Mac's Neural Engine once. You will see progress in Preferences. This takes roughly a minute on a fast connection and only happens once.

After that, Murmurtale opens a short three-step welcome window. Step one is granting permissions.

Where it lives

Murmurtale runs as a menu-bar app — a quill icon near your clock — with no window in the Dock. It also shows a floating pill at the bottom-center of your screen. Both give you the same menu: Start and Stop Dictation, Continuous Listening, Dictionary, History, Preferences, and Quit.

If your menu bar is full and macOS hides the quill icon, the pill is still there. Right-click (or Control-click) the pill to open the menu.

Install Murmurtale on your Mac

Installing

What happens on first launch

Where it lives

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