About
Silkwave is one developer
Silkwave is built by Bakhshi Mnatsakanyan, a software engineer based in Armenia. I have been writing software professionally since 2012, across desktop, backend, frontend, and mobile, and I hold bachelor's and master's degrees in radiophysics from Yerevan State University. I design, write, and support both apps myself: there is no team behind the name and no investors.
Why I built these apps
Silkwave Chat started as something I built for myself. A stronger model seems to arrive every couple of months, and I kept canceling one subscription to sign up for another just to use whichever was currently ahead. Reaching all of them through my own API keys costs me a little more in usage, but it means I no longer have to pick one.
Silkwave Voice came out of realizing what macOS already provides. Apple exposes the APIs needed to build a fully on-device transcription and meeting assistant app, and the newer speech models, SpeechTranscriber in particular, turned out to be both fast and genuinely accurate. macOS also makes ChatGPT reachable through Apple Intelligence and Shortcuts, which is how summaries and chat work without asking you for a separate API key.
The apps
Silkwave Voice
Record. Transcribe. Summarize. Chat. Requires macOS 26 or later.
Silkwave Chat
Bring your own keys. Connect. Chat. Requires macOS 14 or later.
Both are on the Mac App Store. I also build Transit.am, a solo project of mine for iPhone and iPad that plans trips on Yerevan public transport. Everything I have published is on my Apple developer page.
How the apps work
- Transcription runs on your Mac
- Silkwave Voice transcribes with on-device Apple models in more than ten languages, so recordings are never uploaded for processing.
- One purchase, no subscription
- Silkwave Voice is $24.99 and Silkwave Chat is $19.99, each a single purchase with a seven-day free trial. Neither app has a recurring plan.
- Chat uses your own API keys
- Silkwave Chat connects to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Ollama with keys you supply, so you are billed by those providers directly rather than through Silkwave.
- Both are native macOS apps
- Silkwave Chat requires macOS 14 or later and Silkwave Voice requires macOS 26 or later. Both are distributed through the Mac App Store.
Get in touch
For questions, bug reports, or feature requests, write to support@silkwave.ai. You can also find me on LinkedIn.