Skip to documentation content
Keebye Docs

Install and permissions

System requirements, the onboarding window, each permission Keebye asks for, updates, and where models are stored.

Keebye ships as a signed and notarized DMG for Apple Silicon Macs. This page lists what it needs from your Mac and what each permission does.

Requirements

  • macOS 11.0 or later.
  • An Apple Silicon Mac. The release is built for arm64 only.
  • Room for the default speech model: about 670 MB on disk, downloaded once.

The onboarding window

The "Welcome to Keebye" window shows five steps. "Finish unlocks once the model is downloaded and both permissions are granted." The same window reopens later as a repair surface if a permission goes missing, for example after an update.

  1. Downloading the speech model — about 670 MB, one time. This runs while you finish the steps below.

  2. Microphone access — press "Grant microphone access".

  3. Accessibility access — press "Open System Settings" and switch Keebye on.

  4. Pick your push-to-talk key — Fn / Globe, Left ⌘, Right ⌘, Left ⌥, or Right ⌥.

  5. Try it — hold your hotkey and speak into the test field.

Microphone

macOS asks: "Keebye listens to your microphone only while you hold your dictation hotkey, to turn your speech into text." Keebye requests this in onboarding step 2.

Accessibility

Accessibility access lets Keebye watch your hotkey and paste text into any app. Keebye polls the grant every 1.5 seconds and re-arms the hotkey every 2 seconds once granted, so you do not need to restart.

Speech Recognition

Requested only when you select the "Native (Apple Speech)" engine. macOS shows: "Keebye uses on-device speech recognition to turn your dictation into text. Audio stays on your Mac." Until granted, the pill shows "Speech Recognition permission needed — enable Keebye under System Settings › Privacy & Security › Speech Recognition".

Updates

On every launch of a release build Keebye checks github.com/aiescu/keebye-releases for a newer version. If one exists it downloads, installs silently, and restarts the app. There is no prompt and no menu item for this.

Where models are stored

Models live under ~/Library/Application Support/com.keebye.app/models/. Downloads are resumable, verified with SHA-256, and retried up to five times. Only the default model downloads automatically; other engines download when you press "Download model" in Settings.

  • parakeet-v3 — about 670 MB (Settings shows ~640 MB). The default.
  • parakeet-v3-fp32 — about 2.55 GB (Settings shows ~2.4 GB).
  • canary-v2 — about 1.03 GB (Settings shows ~1 GB).
  • llm/Qwen_Qwen3-1.7B-Q4_K_M.gguf — about 1.28 GB, opt-in, used only for local-LLM polish.