Local AI

If you use voice-to-text often, you already know the problem: Whisper transcripts are usually not ready to ship. You get filler words, no punctuation, and sentences that run forever. You can either fix it manually, or you accept something that looks like a raw dump. While testing Apple’s on-device Foundation Model, I found it’s surprisingly good at one specific job: acting like a tiny local editor. It turns a “spoken” transcript into something you can actually paste into notes, chat, or a doc. ...

macOS 26 Tahoe ships with a 3B parameter language model that Apple calls the Foundation Model. It normally hides in the system powering Writing Tools, Siri, and other features, but you can actually pull it out, wrap it as an OpenAI-compatible API, and plug it into any tool that supports the OpenAI format. Runs completely locally, no network calls, no cost. Prerequisites You need macOS 26 Tahoe (now at 26.3 stable) and an Apple Silicon Mac. Intel Macs won’t work because Apple Intelligence only supports M-series chips. ...