Getting started.
From download to your first dictated sentence. You need an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 15 or later, with at least 8 GB of memory.
Seven steps.
- 01
Request beta access & install
Tyne is currently in invite-only macOS beta. Request beta access, then open the signed, notarized installer from your invite email and drag Tyne into Applications. Tyne runs from the macOS menu bar and main workspace window.
- 02
Grant permissions (Screen Recording is optional)
On first launch, allow Microphone (required to hear you dictate) and Accessibility (recommended so Tyne can paste text into other apps). Screen & System Audio is optional during onboarding—you can skip it and still dictate everywhere. Grant it later only if you want meeting system-audio capture, opt-in local Screen Memory, or Circle to Search. Calendar and Reminders are requested only when you trigger those actions.
- 03
Download local models (~1.98 GB once)
Onboarding downloads four local model packages once into
~/Library/Application Support/Tyne/Models/: Parakeet-TDT 0.6B (~800 MB, dictation), S1-mini 0.6B (~462 MB, text normalizer), Whisper Large Turbo (~632 MB, meetings), and SpeakerKit Pyannote (~90 MB, speaker diarization), alongside Loom 3B for on-device reasoning.Downloads pause/resume cleanly if your connection drops. - 04
Choose Local Only or Balanced mode
Free and Plus run in Local Only mode: zero user content ever leaves your Mac. On Turbo, you can switch between Local Only and Balanced mode at any time. In Balanced mode, dictation and your vault remain on-device, while complex Ask Tyne, Ask Atlas, anonymized live web search, and Circle to Search requests can use up to 150 Loom Turbo cloud actions/day (250k tokens/day, 5M/month cap) with automatic fallback to local Loom 3B.
- 05
Dictate, Ask, and Speak to Prompt
Click into any text field, hold Fn and speak; when you release, cleaned text is inserted once at your cursor as a single undo step. Press ⌥ Space to open Ask Tyne or say “log it” to file a note into your encrypted vault. Press ⌥ ⇧ Space in an IDE or terminal to compile a repo-aware prompt for Claude, Codex, or Cursor.
- 06
Work with documents in Atlas
Open the Atlas section and drop PDFs, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, CSV, Markdown, or images (up to 200 MB per file) into topics. Check or uncheck specific sources in a topic to scope retrieval, ask questions with clickable page/cell/slide citations, and export deliverables as Word (
.docx), PDF, or Excel (.xlsx). - 07
Capture meetings & screen context
When starting a meeting transcript, choose your audio scope explicitly: Microphone only, Meeting audio only, or Microphone + meeting audio. An active recording indicator stays visible while capturing, and you are responsible for obtaining participant consent where required. For visual questions, use Circle to Search to lasso a screen region—Local Only reads it via on-device Vision OCR, while Balanced mode can also send that cropped selection to Loom Turbo vision when you press Ask.
When it doesn't type.
Nothing appears where I am typing
Check System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility and make sure Tyne is switched on. If you just granted or rebuilt the app, quit and reopen Tyne.
The text went to my clipboard instead
That is deliberate. Tyne refuses to paste into secure password fields or while Shift, Control, or Option is held. Press ⌘V yourself when you are ready.
Meeting audio only captures my voice (or fails to start)
Capturing the other side of a call requires Screen & System Audio permission in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Screen & System Audio Recording. Without it, you can still record using the "Microphone only" meeting scope.
What happens if I hit the Turbo daily limit or lose Wi-Fi?
Tyne never locks your workspace. If a cloud request fails, times out, or reaches the 150-action daily cap, Tyne automatically routes the request to Loom 3B on your Mac.
Where things live.
You can back up vault.enc and atlas/ with Time Machine while encrypted. Export any notes or Atlas reports before uninstalling.
- Encrypted vault
- ~/Library/Application Support/in.tyne.desktop/vault.enc
- Encrypted Atlas files
- ~/Library/Application Support/in.tyne.desktop/atlas/*.blob
- Vault master key
- macOS Keychain · in.tyne.desktop
- Local models (~1.98 GB)
- ~/Library/Application Support/Tyne/Models/
in.tyne.desktop. Tyne never holds a copy. If you delete the in.tyne.desktop Keychain item without exporting your notes and documents first, vault.enc and all encrypted Atlas blobs become permanently unreadable and cannot be recovered.Still stuck? Email support@tyne.in.