Your voice works differently. So should your tools.
The ADHD brain fires faster than fingers can type. Dyslexia makes the written word fight back. Executive dysfunction turns a blank page into a brick wall. Yaps lets you skip all of that and just talk. Privately, offline, on your Mac.
Faster than typing for ADHD users
Of dyslexic students improve with TTS
Private and on-device
Setup steps to start talking
Capture the thought before it vanishes
This might feel familiar
How Yaps helps
Built for brains that work differently
Not a workaround. Not an accommodation. Tools that genuinely fit the way your mind operates.
Thought Capture Before It Vanishes
The ADHD brain generates brilliant ideas at inconvenient times. Yaps sits in your menu bar, always one shortcut away. By the time you finish a sentence, the thought is already saved and transcribed. No context switch, no lost spark.
TTS Comprehension Aid
Having text read aloud dramatically improves comprehension and proofreading for dyslexic users. Paste any text into Yaps and hear it spoken back with natural, human-sounding voices. Catch errors your eyes skip over because your ears process language differently.
Zero-Friction Voice Notes
No app to open. No blank page to stare at. No title field to fill in. One keyboard shortcut starts recording. Talk for ten seconds or ten minutes. Your words are transcribed, timestamped, and searchable. On bad brain days, this is everything.
Sensory-Friendly Design
Yaps lives quietly in your menu bar. No flashy interfaces, no notification storms, no visual clutter competing for your attention. Simple keyboard shortcuts, clean typography, predictable behavior. It does its job without overwhelming your senses.
Searchable Thought Archive
Every voice note and dictation session is transcribed and searchable by keyword. That idea you rambled about last Thursday at 2 AM? Search for it. The insight you had while walking the dog? It is there. Your scattered thoughts become a findable library.
Offline, Always Available
Executive dysfunction does not wait for Wi-Fi. Yaps runs entirely on your Mac with no internet connection required. Whether you are in bed, on a plane, or avoiding the world — your voice tools work. No login, no loading, no barriers.
Real ways neurodivergent people use Yaps
These are not hypothetical. These are the daily realities of brains that work differently.
ADHD Idea Capture
You are in the shower and the solution to a problem you have been stuck on for a week suddenly clicks. With Yaps, you grab your Mac, press one key, and speak it before the dopamine window closes. The thought survives. You did not have to type a single letter.
Okay so the thing about the project is — we should restructure the whole API around events, not requests — and the auth layer needs to — wait, also the caching, the caching should be per-tenant...
”Dyslexia Writing Support
When letters rearrange themselves and spelling becomes a battle, voice input removes the entire obstacle. You speak fluently because dyslexia is not a thinking problem — it is a decoding problem. Yaps lets your ideas flow without the written word getting in the way.
Dear team — I wanted to follow up on yesterday's meeting. I think the approach we discussed has real potential, but I have some concerns about the timeline...
”Executive Function Workaround
On days when getting started feels physically impossible, Yaps removes every barrier. No decisions about where to save, what to name the file, which app to use. Press one button. Talk. That is it. Sometimes the hardest part is starting, and Yaps makes starting effortless.
Study Aid with Text-to-Speech
Reading dense textbooks or long documents is exhausting when your brain processes written text differently. Paste the text into Yaps and listen to it instead. Many neurodivergent learners retain information dramatically better through auditory processing.
Paste lecture notes, textbook chapters, or research papers and have Yaps read them aloud while you follow along or take a walk.
”Unmasked Journaling
Neurodivergent people spend enormous energy masking in daily life. Your private voice journal should be a place where you do not perform. With Yaps, your unfiltered thoughts stay on your device. No cloud sync, no company reading your data, no reason to self-censor.
Body Doubling Alternative
Sometimes you need to talk through a problem to understand it. Yaps is a judgment-free space to think out loud. Dictate your way through a task, narrate your process, or rubber-duck debug. Talking activates different neural pathways than typing — and for many neurodivergent minds, that makes all the difference.
Hear from people like you.
“I have ADHD and I used to lose dozens of ideas every single day. They would flash through my mind while I was doing something else, and by the time I pulled up a notes app, they were gone. Yaps changed that completely. I just hit a shortcut and start talking. I have captured more useful ideas in the last month than the entire previous year. It sounds dramatic but it is not — this is what happens when a tool finally matches how your brain actually works.”
Marcus Chen
Software Engineer, ADHD
Resources from the blog
Your brain is not the problem. Your tools were.
Start talking. Yaps captures your thoughts exactly as fast as you think them. Privately, offline, on your Mac.
Requires macOS 13.0+ (Apple Silicon recommended)