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An tool that turns your Apple TV Siri Remote into an elegant wireless trackpad, button controller and local dictation microphone for your Mac.
# Human Interface Design
# Vibe Coding Accessory
# Open Source Project
Download v1.0.0
Human-Computer Interaction · macOS App Development
iRemote is a macOS menu-bar utility that transforms Apple TV Siri Remote into an input device for Mac. Its touchpad works as a focus-based navigation surface, and the Siri/microphone button enables push-to-talk dictation. Audio is captured from the remote over Bluetooth, transcribed locally with OpenAI’s Whisper model, and entered into the active text field. Designed around lightweight hands-off interaction, iRemote combines remote navigation, button input, multilingual dictation and model management in one compact desktop tool.
· Apple Silicon Mac
· macOS 14 Sonoma or later
· 1st-generation Apple TV Siri Remote, the one with a shiny black casing
Currently Not Supported
· 2nd-generation and newer Siri Remotes
· Intel Macs have not been listed as the target platform
· iPhone, iPad, Windows or non-macOS devices
Because iRemote uses Bluetooth packet capture, local transcription and macOS Accessibility control, the first-time setup includes a few required steps.
1. Pair the Siri Remote with your Mac in System Settings → Bluetooth.
2. Install Apple’s PacketLogger from Additional Tools for Xcode.
3. Install whisper.cpp with Homebrew.
(Open Terminal and run: brew install whisper-cpp )
4. Install Bluetooth Profile following the prompts in iRemote.
5. Choose a Whisper model by clicking “Manage Whisper Models” in iRemote.
6. Optionally run “Calibrate Touchpad“ in iRemote.
This setup only needs to be completed once unless you change devices, remove dependencies, or reset system permissions. Always grant permission to iRemote when prompted.
1. Hold the Siri/microphone button on your Apple TV Siri Remote.
2. Speak into the remote.
3. Release the button.
4. iRemote transcribes the audio locally.
5. The transcript is pasted into the focused text field.
The transcription runs on-device using whisper.cpp. No audio is sent to a cloud service by iRemote.
Language Support
iRemote uses Whisper’s automatic language detection by default.
It works especially well for:
· English dictation
· Mandarin dictation
· Mixed English and Mandarin input
For Mandarin, iRemote includes additional punctuation handling, so Chinese punctuation can be produced more naturally. For mixed-language input, punctuation is normalized based on the surrounding text context.
· Bluetooth packet data
· Siri Remote microphone audio
· Temporary transcription files
· Whisper model files
· Touchpad calibration settings
What iRemote Does Not Do
· No analytics
· No telemetry
· No crash reporting
· No automatic cloud upload
· No transcription through an external API
The only network activity happens when the user chooses to download Whisper models or opens Apple’s Bluetooth profile download page.
Only the 1st-generation Apple TV Siri Remote is currently supported. Newer Siri Remotes use a different Bluetooth protocol and are not supported in this version.
Setup is more technical than a typical Mac app.
iRemote requires PacketLogger, whisper.cpp, Apple’s Bluetooth Logging Profile, and Accessibility permission. This is because the app needs low-level Bluetooth access and local transcription support.
The app is not notarized yet.
The release build is ad-hoc signed. On first launch, macOS Gatekeeper may ask the user to right-click the app and choose Open manually.