Under the hood: for the curious who want to look inside.
The front page promises you it just works — and it does. But some of us love to know what’s happening beneath the surface. That’s what this page is for. Here we take off the apron and show you the workshop: every choice you can make, if you want to — and every one you can happily leave alone if you don’t.
The point of Vara isn’t that you understand all of this. The point is that you can — and that the guided start turns each choice into a friendly question instead of a setting you have to google.
Two engines: the cloud or your own Mac
Vara needs two things: something that hears your speech (transcription), and something that polishes the text (cleanup). Both can run wherever you like.
Free in the cloud. The fastest path. With a free Groq key, Vara is blazing fast and you’re up and running in seconds. Prefer a particular provider — OpenAI, ElevenLabs — you can choose that instead.
Entirely on your Mac, fully offline. Choose the local path and Vara transcribes right on the machine with WhisperKit. No key, no internet, no one listening in — your voice and your text never leave your Mac. This needs an Apple Silicon Mac (M-series), which has the muscle to do it fast and silently in the background.
Bring your own AI
This is where Vara stands apart. The cleanup — the part that turns mess into clean text — Vara can do with the AI you already have:
Your coding subscription. Already using Claude Code, Codex or Gemini CLI? Vara can borrow the same access — with no extra API key at all. You don’t pay for anything twice.
A local model. Run the cleanup on your own Mac or server with Ollama, LM Studio or your own setup. Nothing leaves the machine.
Your own cloud key. Already have a key with Groq (free), OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini or ElevenLabs? Drop it in and Vara uses it.
In short: Vara doesn’t push you into one ecosystem. It meets you where you already are.
Modes, custom prompts and per-app rules
Vara runs your speech through a mode before inserting the text. Five are built in: Raw inserts verbatim, with no cleanup and no AI at all. Clean text removes ums, fillers and false starts and fixes punctuation — your everyday mode. Professional rewrites your speech into polished text without losing the meaning. VibeCode turns spoken developer intent into a precise prompt for your AI coding agent. And Ask AI treats your speech as a question and inserts the answer.
On top of that, you can build your own modes with your own system prompt — so Vara writes in exactly the tone you need. You can bind a mode to a specific app, so it switches all by itself: professional in your mail, raw in your editor. And with the digit override (1–9) you pick a mode on the fly without breaking your flow.
Privacy, in plain terms
No account. No cookies. No profile of you. Choose the local path and everything is handled on your own Mac — neither audio nor text goes anywhere. Choose the cloud and the audio is sent only to the provider you picked, used solely to produce the text — never to train anything or build a profile. You decide, and you can change your mind any time.
The vara command-line tool
Live in the terminal? Vara comes with a small command-line tool, vara, so you can control and script your dictation right where you already work. It’s entirely optional — if the terminal isn’t your home, you’ll never notice it.
The guided 8-step onboarding
All of the above sounds like a lot. In practice it isn’t, because you never meet it all at once. The first time you open Vara, an eight-step start takes you by the hand: it asks whether you want to run on your Mac or in the cloud, helps you set your shortcut, suggests sensible defaults and lets you try it right away.
Each step is one friendly question — never a wall of settings. You come out the other side with a Vara set up exactly the way you want it, without having felt technical for a single second.