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For students

A free voice OS for every late-night essay.

Record any lecture and walk back to the dorm with a clean summary in your pocket. Dictate the essay you've been putting off. Ask the AI chat about a reading without leaving the PDF. All on-device. No subscription.

Download for Mac

A field guide for students, updated May 4, 2026 by Branden Chong.

In practice

Three things Dollop does for students.

  1. 01.

    Record any lecture, get a summary on the way home.

    Hit ⌃ R before class. Dollop records, transcribes locally, and produces a summary plus action items the moment you stop. Search across your full semester before an exam. Audio and transcripts stay on your Mac, no Otter or Fireflies cloud upload.

    Heard

    key argument: postwar US growth was unevenly distributed; the Gini coefficient masks the real story. follow-up readings: Piketty 2014, Saez 2020. exam likely focus: causal mechanism behind 1980s divergence.

  2. 02.

    Draft essays out loud.

    Hit ⌥ Space, speak through your argument the way you'd explain it to a friend, then edit. Dollop's cleanup adapter trims the ums and reorders mid-sentence rephrasing automatically, so the rough draft already reads like prose.

    Heard

    so the main argument is, like, that postwar economic policy actually accelerated, um, the inequality we see today, wait, let me restart that. Postwar economic policy accelerated, rather than mitigated, the inequality patterns of the late 20th century.

  3. 03.

    Ask the AI chat about a reading.

    Open the PDF, hit ⌃ S to summon the chat overlay with screen context on, ask for the key argument or a one-paragraph summary. The chat reads what's on screen, locally, and answers without sending the file anywhere.

  4. 04.

    Reply to professors and TAs.

    Email tone matters. Dollop shifts to formal automatically when the cursor is in Mail, casual in Messages, terse in Linear. One dictation, the right voice for the app.

    Heard

    Hi Professor Chen, thanks for the feedback on the draft. I'll incorporate your notes about the methodology section and resubmit by Friday.

What you actually get

Dollop mapped to your work.

Meeting Notes (⌃ R)
Record lectures and study-group sessions locally. Search transcripts across your full semester before exams.
Voice dictation (⌥ Space)
Essays, papers, replies to professors and TAs, all by voice in Google Docs, Word, Pages, Notion.
AI chat with screen context (⌃ S)
Open a 40-page reading, ask for the key argument or a one-paragraph summary. The PDF doesn't leave your Mac.
Per-app tone matching
Formal in Mail to professors, casual in Messages to friends, terse in Notion notes.
0 GB of RAM
Useful when you have 8 GB on the laptop and 30 Chrome tabs open during finals.
Works offline
Library Wi-Fi is unreliable. Dictation, lecture recording, and AI chat all run on-device.
A type specimen

How the cleanup reads.

Real before-and-after dictation on terms specific to students, processed locally on Apple Foundation Models.

Essay draft (rephrasings tightened)
Heard

so the main argument is, like, that postwar economic policy actually accelerated, um, the inequality we see today, wait let me restart that. postwar economic policy accelerated, rather than mitigated, the inequality patterns of the late 20th century.

Cleaned

Postwar economic policy accelerated, rather than mitigated, the inequality patterns of the late 20th century.

Email to professor (formal tone in Mail)
Heard

hi professor chen thanks for the feedback on the draft i'll incorporate your notes about the methodology section and resubmit by friday

Cleaned

Hi Professor Chen, thanks for the feedback on the draft. I'll incorporate your notes about the methodology section and resubmit by Friday.

Why it fits

Why Dollop fits a student budget.

Free forever, three tools in one.

No trial, no premium tier, no credit card. Dictation, AI chat, and Meeting Notes are all unlocked from install. Wispr Flow is $15/month, Otter charges per recording minute, Granola is $15/month. Dollop is free because it runs on the model Apple already ships in macOS.

0 GB of RAM.

Local Whisper apps load 700 MB to 2 GB into memory. Dollop contributes nothing on top, Apple Foundation Models is already in the OS. Useful when you have 8 GB on the laptop and 30 Chrome tabs open.

Works offline.

Library Wi-Fi is unreliable. Cloud dictation tools fail when the connection does. Dollop runs entirely on your Mac, dictation, chat, and Meeting Notes all work on a plane, in a basement seminar room, or anywhere you can't trust the network.

Privacy that holds up.

No audio leaves your Mac. No transcripts uploaded. No third-party AI provider sees your draft, your lecture recording, or your study notes. If you're recording a class with a professor who hasn't consented to cloud recording, on-device is the only ethical choice.

Asked & answered

Questions, answered.

Can Dollop record and transcribe lectures? +
Yes, that is what Meeting Notes does. Hit ⌃ R before class to start recording with your Mac mic; Dollop transcribes on-device and produces a summary plus action items. Recordings and transcripts live on your Mac, searchable across your whole semester.
Is recording a lecture allowed? +
Most universities permit recording for personal study, but not for redistribution; check your school's academic integrity policy and the syllabus. Some classes ask you to request permission first; on-device recording is generally easier to approve because nothing leaves your Mac.
Is Dollop really free for students? +
Yes, free for everyone. No student verification, no academic license, no premium tier. The full app is the free app.
Can it dictate into Google Docs and Microsoft Word? +
Yes. Dollop pastes clean text at your cursor in any app, Docs, Word, Pages, Notion, Notes, Obsidian, your browser. System-wide.
Will my professors know I used dictation? +
No. Dollop produces clean prose at the cursor, no watermark, no "generated by AI" tag, nothing in the document metadata. The cleanup adapter is small and stylistically conservative; you still own the argument and the structure.
What about citations and academic integrity? +
Dollop is a typing tool, not a research tool. It doesn't generate references, doesn't write essays for you, doesn't hallucinate sources. Treating it like a faster keyboard is the right mental model. AI chat (⌃ S) can help rewrite a sentence, but the substance is yours.
Does it work without internet? +
Yes, fully. Speech recognition runs on Apple's Neural Engine; cleanup, chat, and Meeting Notes summaries run on Apple Foundation Models on-device. The only network calls are software updates.
What Macs does it work on? +
Apple Silicon (M1 or later) running macOS 26 (Tahoe) with Apple Intelligence enabled. Most Macs sold since 2020 qualify.

You're already paying for tuition, textbooks, and an espresso to stay awake through Hegel. The voice OS for your Mac, including lecture recording, should be the part that's free. Download Dollop and dictate your next essay tonight.

Download for Mac
Dollop

The voice OS for your Mac. Built with care in California.

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