What Nico is, and the first five minutes

Nico is a Mac app that does two things.

It turns talking into text. Hold your hotkey in any application, say what you mean, let go. The speech is turned into words on this Mac, and the words land on the clipboard ready to paste — into the email, the commit message, the prompt.

It keeps the small tools you ask for. Turn on create app and describe what you want. Nico hands the job to the Claude Code, Codex or Ollama already installed on your Mac, under your own subscription, and then gives what comes back a home: one folder per app, a data folder that survives every run so what it collects accumulates instead of vanishing, and ten versions kept so a bad edit is not a disaster.

The first five minutes

1. Open Nico and let it ask for the microphone. macOS asks once — see Microphone, and the permissions Nico does not ask for if you have already said no.

2. Record a test on the Status screen. A recording with a level on it is the only proof the microphone really works.

3. Press your hotkey somewhere real, say a sentence, and paste the result.

4. If you want apps and asks as well as dictation, install one of the three command-line tools Nico drives. See What you need installed.

Nico runs on macOS on Apple silicon. The speech model ships inside the app, so dictation works before you have installed anything else.

What Nico does not have

No account, no sign-in, no password, no workspace and no team. Nothing to sign into means nothing to be locked out of.

Your recordings, transcripts and apps are ordinary folders on your Mac. No request Nico makes ever carries a file, your voice, or anything an app produces. Two things ever leave the machine: a model download, and — about once a month — a licence check carrying your key and a machine fingerprint.

When you subscribe, a licence key arrives by email and you paste it into the Status screen. That is the whole of the relationship.