Shell Pilot 1.18.0

August 30, 2026

Voice dictation. Speak a command, watch it appear at the prompt, press Return to run it. Recognition runs on-device, so nothing you say leaves your Mac.

Dictate into the terminal

Settings › Assistance › Voice Dictation has a new enable toggle and a hotkey recorder (default ⌃⌥D). With it on, press the hotkey to start listening and press again to stop. There is also a microphone button in the toolbar and a Terminal › Dictate menu item.

Dictated text is streamed into the selected session's prompt as keystrokes, in the same way autocomplete insertions are. It never runs a command by itself — you press Return, exactly as if you had typed it.

On-device, private by default

• Powered by Apple's SFSpeechRecognizer. No audio is recorded to disk and no transcript is sent anywhere.
• Access is opt-in. The first dictation asks for microphone and speech recognition permission; if denied, Settings shows exactly where to re-enable it in System Settings › Privacy & Security instead of failing silently.

How the stream behaves

Partial recognition results are forwarded as deltas, so the terminal never sees duplicate characters as the recognizer catches up. When a recognition pass rewrites an earlier token, the stream re-baselines rather than echoing the correction back — the prompt stays clean.

Known limits

• The app is not notarized, so a first install still shows a Gatekeeper prompt.
• The hotkey is in-app only (it does not intercept keystrokes while another application is frontmost).