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Guide · macOS

Installing Molvi on Mac

Five steps, 5–10 minutes including the model download. Works on any Apple Silicon Mac — M1, M2, M3, M4 and newer (macOS 13.5+); the newer the chip, the faster the recognition. Intel Macs are not supported.

Download the disk image

Click the button — it opens the latest release page on GitHub. Download the Molvi-…dmg file (~150 MB) from the "Assets" section.

Download the latest release

Why GitHub

Molvi is open source, and GitHub is its official and only source. Disk images from anywhere else could be fakes.

Install it and get past Gatekeeper

Open the DMG and drag Molvi onto the Applications shortcut. On first launch, macOS shows a warning — and offers only "Move to Trash." That's expected; you won't need the trash:

The Gatekeeper dialog in macOS 15 (illustration). Click "Done" — not "Move to Trash."

  • click "Done";
  • open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to the line "'Molvi' was blocked…";
  • click "Open Anyway" and confirm.
Faster — with one Terminal command

xattr -cr /Applications/Molvi.app — removes the quarantine flag; after that, Molvi opens with a plain double-click, no warnings at all. On macOS 13–14, the old method still works too: right-click Molvi → "Open" → "Open".

Why this dialog appears

Apple trusts apps that are notarized (a paid developer subscription, $99 a year). Molvi is free and doesn't have that, so Gatekeeper plays it safe — and in macOS 15 it got stricter and removed the "Open" option from the right-click menu. Molvi's code is open — anyone can check what's inside.

Go through the first-run wizard

Molvi walks you through setup itself — a few short screens.

  • RecommendedMaximum — large-v3-turbo — large-v3-level quality, but fast: Apple Silicon recognizes speech through Metal (the mlx-whisper engine). ~1.6 GB download, enough even for an M1 with 8 GB of memory.
  • If you're really tight on spacesmall / base — smaller and faster to download, lower quality.
  • on the "Downloading components" step, click "Start download" and wait for "Done!";
  • on the "Microphone" step, say something — the bar should move (macOS will ask for microphone access — allow it);
  • the default dictation key is right ⌘; you don't have to change it, and you can always do so later in Settings.

The model downloads from Hugging Face (mlx-community) — an open conversion of OpenAI's Whisper. Saved to ~/.cache/huggingface.

Grant two macOS permissions

Molvi listens for the dictation key and inserts text into the active window — macOS requires explicit permission for both. The wizard shows a dedicated step with "Grant…" buttons that open the right System Settings panes:

  • RequiredInput Monitoring — without it, Molvi can't see the dictation key.
  • RequiredAccessibility — without it, Molvi can't insert the recognized text.
  • turn on the Molvi checkbox in both panes;
  • after granting access, restart Molvi (menu bar icon → "Quit," then reopen it) — macOS applies permissions on startup.
Why this is safe

Molvi uses these permissions only for the dictation key and inserting text — the whole codebase is open, and recognition never leaves your computer: neither audio nor text is ever sent anywhere.

Dictate your first phrase

  • wait for the "Ready" notification (the Molvi icon lives in the menu bar, top right);
  • place your cursor in any text field — Notes, a browser, Terminal;
  • hold right ⌘ — a "Recording…" pill appears;
  • say: "Hi! This is Molvi typing with my voice";
  • release the key — within a second or two, the text appears at your cursor.
If you want to change something

Molvi menu bar icon → "Settings…": key, microphone, language, model quality, sounds, autostart.

If something went wrong

I updated Molvi — the key or insertion stopped working

When you update an unsigned app, macOS resets the permissions you granted. In System Settings → Privacy & Security, toggle the Molvi checkboxes off and back on in "Input Monitoring" and "Accessibility" (or remove Molvi from the list and add it again) and restart the app.

I got a notification: "no Accessibility permission"

The insertion failed, but the text isn't lost — it's still on the clipboard, press ⌘V. Grant the permission (step 4) and restart Molvi — after that, text will insert itself.

The first dictation after launch is slow

That's expected: on the first recognition, Metal compiles its compute kernels (a few seconds). The second phrase already recognizes in one to two seconds.

Text doesn't appear

Check your microphone in Settings (menu bar icon) and make sure your cursor is in a text field. Error log: ~/Library/Application Support/Molvi/molvi.log. Still stuck? — open an issue.

I have an Intel Mac

Not supported yet: recognition runs through Apple's MLX engine, which requires an M-series chip (M1 or newer).

How to completely remove Molvi (or reinstall from scratch)

Molvi keeps everything in three places — the app, the data folder, and the model cache. First quit Molvi (menu bar icon → "Quit"), then run this in Terminal:

# the app
rm -rf /Applications/Molvi.app
# settings and log
rm -rf ~/Library/"Application Support"/Molvi
# autostart (if enabled)
rm -f ~/Library/LaunchAgents/tech.molvi.app.plist
# downloaded model (~1.6 GB)
rm -rf ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--mlx-community--whisper*
# reset granted permissions (optional)
tccutil reset ListenEvent tech.molvi.app
tccutil reset Accessibility tech.molvi.app
tccutil reset Microphone tech.molvi.app

After this, nothing of Molvi remains on the system. To reinstall, just go through this page's steps again — including Gatekeeper and granting permissions. Without Terminal: drag the app to the Trash from the Applications folder, and drag the ~/Library/Application Support/Molvi folder to the Trash from Finder (Go → Go to Folder…).