Overview

Alchemist is a voice to text app for Mac, Windows, Linux and the Steam Deck. Hold a shortcut, talk, and your words land as text in whatever app you are using. Core dictation runs on your own machine, works offline, and is free and unlimited, with no account. Pro adds real time dictation, where the words appear while you speak, plus encrypted sync across your computers, modes that clean up your writing, and custom skins for the recording pill. Alchemist is built by one person, Thomas Matlock, in Athens, Georgia.

Fact sheet

Maker: Thomas Matlock, solo founder, Alchemist Labs LLC (founded April 2024)
Based in: Athens, Georgia, USA
Platforms: macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows 10 and 11, Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm, AUR; GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, MATE, Budgie, LXQt, Hyprland, Sway; X11 and Wayland), Steam Deck
Price: Free, $0, no account and no card. Pro, $10 a month or $96 a year. Infinite, $249 once for lifetime Pro. Teams, custom. Every install opens with 15 minutes of Pro.
Languages: free dictation in about 99 languages on your machine; real time in 40 languages on Pro
Website: getalchemist.app
Changelog: getalchemist.app/changelog
Press contact: [email protected]

The numbers

Measured from the moment the shortcut is released to the text landing in the app, every step included.

Real time, Pro: 13 ms on Linux, 20 ms on macOS, 27 ms on Windows (September 19, 2026); 18 ms on the Steam Deck (October 9, 2026). A single frame on a 60 Hz monitor is about 16.7 ms.
Real time runs on the processor, with the graphics card idle, and the wait after you stop does not grow with how long you spoke: 20 ms after 2.8 seconds of speech, 33 ms after 104.8 seconds.
Free, on your machine: 44 ms on Linux (September 3, 2026), 80 ms on Windows (September 4, 2026), 89 ms on macOS (October 16, 2026).
Test machines: Windows and Linux on one desktop, dual booted (AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, NVIDIA RTX 5070); macOS on an M4 Max MacBook Pro.

What only Alchemist does

The only voice to text app with encrypted sync across computers. Your dictations are encrypted on your machine before they leave it (AES-256-GCM); the server stores data it cannot read.
The first and only dictation app on the Steam Deck. The back grips, L4 and R4, dictate over any game with no setup.
Runs on every desktop on Earth. Mac, Windows and Linux, with or without a graphics card, about 90% of Linux desktops checked on real hardware.
Works offline. The core app needs no internet, real time included.
Your history comes with you. One click imports your dictations from five third party dictation apps on Mac, four on Windows. Your words export to Markdown, and live into Obsidian, Logseq or Notion.
Zero third party analytics in the app. The local database is encrypted at rest. The app keeps simple usage counts on Alchemist's own servers, and the bug reporter is opt in.
Built by one person.

Founder

Thomas Matlock is a self taught developer and designer. He has built for the web since 2015 and has written code since 2018. His portfolio site won a CSS Design Award in 2023, while he was working delivery fifty hours a week. In 2025 he placed in the top 3%, one of 75 out of 2,200 applicants, for a developer role at 37signals, while driving trucks. He wasn't hired, so he quit trucking to go all in on Alchemist. It took fifteen months.