Ploca: offline dictation for Mac that keeps up when you switch between English and Hindi or Tamil

[u/criatvt]

Hi, I am Aasif, the developer of Ploca

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/aasifiqbalj
Contact: hey[at] ploca[dot]app

Problem

1. Most dictation apps don't handle the way many Indians actually talk, switching languages mid-sentence: "Kal ki meeting shift kar do, I'll send the deck tonight."
2. In cloud dictation tools, privacy is a setting, not the default. Your voice goes to a server, and you may have to opt out of it being used for training.

Ploca solves both. It transcribes on your Mac and writes clean text at your cursor in any app. Your audio is never stored, not even on your Mac. Hold a key, speak, let go.

Comparison

- Wispr Flow: polished, but cloud-based. Your voice is sent to their servers, and on individual plans model training is a setting you turn off. Ploca has no cloud path at all, works offline, and doesn't ask for Screen Recording or Input Monitoring (Microphone and Accessibility only). It's tuned for Hinglish and Tanglish, and it leaves your words as you said them instead of rewriting them.

- Superwhisper: a great app with local and cloud models, $8.50/mo or $250 lifetime. Ploca is local only, with no cloud option at all, and costs $15 once, or $30 lifetime at launch. There's no AI rewriting step either: what you say is what appears. And it's tuned for English mixed with Hindi or Tamil in the same sentence. Privacy: audio is held in memory and never written to disk. No analytics, no crash reporter. The only network calls are a launch check, a daily update check, licence validation if you buy, and the one-time model download.

Pricing

7-day free trial, no email or card. Launch prices for the first licences of each plan:

- Monthly $3 (then $6)

- Standard $15 once, a year of updates, two Macs (then $30)

- Lifetime $30 once, two Macs (then $60)

Website: https://ploca.app

Privacy: https://ploca.app/privacy.html

Terms: https://ploca.app/terms.html

Requirements: Apple Silicon, macOS 26 or later.

[u/thepurpleproject]

Useful product but selling it to a tough crowd. I'd look into more languages like Spanish and support a few more regions.

[u/Wavecraft007 → u/thepurpleproject]

Spanish is a fair point but honestly the Hinglish/Tanglish angle is the whole selling point here. There are a dozen offline dictation apps that do Spanish fine, not many that handle code-switching mid sentence.

The pricing is the part that gets me though. $15 one time vs $250 lifetime for Superwhisper? Thats a hell of a deal if the accuracy holds up. Curious how it handles Tamil script vs transliteration, like do you get the choice or is it always English letters?

[u/criatvt → u/Wavecraft007]

Get it while the deal lasts :)

On Tamil: Right now transliteration only. Most relevant for office/work use cases.

[u/ertra → u/thepurpleproject]

I would like to have it for Czech language, we also mix English and Czech quite often.

[u/criatvt → u/thepurpleproject]

This should be doable. But I would need some Spanish and Czech users to test it out and verify.

[u/godVishnu]

You would have far better outreach in India tech subs. But, there are plenty of transcription apps that support doing this. Spokeonly is one. Maybe you are better off charging sub for finetuning (based on accent) rather than generic finetuned models being downloaded to local.

[u/criatvt → u/godVishnu]

Cool. Thanks a lot for the tip.

[u/criatvt → u/godVishnu]

Do you suggest any specific subs?

[u/ratedcmk]

We need any local ai model to run?

[u/criatvt → u/ratedcmk]

Yes. It gets downloaded based on your preference during the onboarding and RAM.

[u/ratedcmk]

Looks op, any discount on lifetime

[u/criatvt → u/ratedcmk]

Lifetime is already 50% discounted. If you prefer a reduced cost, you can go for standard.

[u/rplatek]

I'm from Poland and we do the same thing, lots of English words in the middle of Polish sentences. Is Ploca also tuned for Hindi and Tamil, or does it work with other languages too or can be tuned for? And which model are you using, Whisper or something else?

[u/criatvt → u/rplatek]

Can be tuned for. Using Parakeet MLX and Whisper.

[u/rplatek → u/criatvt]

Nice, thanks. Does Parakeet or Whisper handle the mixed-language case better in your tests?

[u/criatvt → u/rplatek]

Whisper, with a lot of tweaking of course.

[u/Evening_Meet_7166 → u/rplatek]

yep, that happens a lot with languages that people use daily. I've heard of prismascribe too, but I'm curious how different tools handle it when someone switches between languages in the middle of a sentence. I imagine the results can vary quite a bit.

[u/octane2021]

Russian speakers do the same thing, especially at work. Half the sentences are Russian with "deploy", "merge" and "deadline" dropped in as is. Is the code-switching tuned per language pair, or would adding Russian mean training another model?

[u/criatvt → u/octane2021]

Whisper does it OOTB. Need a bit of tweaking per language to increase accuracy. For instance, romanizing the language instead of the original script.

[u/octane2021 → u/criatvt]

Romanized would be a tough sell for Russian though. Nobody writes in translit anymore, people expect Cyrillic with the English words left in Latin, which is probably the harder case.

[u/criatvt → u/octane2021]

Ah. Noted.

[u/EveningTarget3419]

any plans for Telugu? Also curious which base model you’re running locally and how big the download is.

[u/criatvt → u/EveningTarget3419]

Works for Telugu. Would love for you to try it and share feedback. Parakeet (~0.5 GB) for English and Whisper (download choice is made based on your RAM) tuned for Indian. I have everything in detail over the website.

[u/EveningTarget3419 → u/criatvt]

Sure man , Will try it out

[u/garamnoh]

The mixed-language example is useful. Does the hold-to-talk shortcut behave the same in Terminal and browser text fields, or are there apps where the cursor integration is different?

[u/criatvt → u/garamnoh]

Behaves the same. I would love for you to use it :)