I'm tracking them all here:

https://opensource.builders/alternatives/superwhisper

Just added Ghost Pepper, and you can actually create a skill.md with the features you need to build your own

In the /r/macapps subreddit, they have huge influx of new apps posts, and the "whisper dictation" is one of the most saturated category. [0]

>“Compare” - This is the most important part. Apps in the most saturated categories (whisper dictation, clipboard managers, wallpaper apps, etc.) must clearly explain their differentiation from existing solutions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1r6d06r/new_post_r...

I cobbled my own together one night before I came across the thoughtfully-built KeyVox and got to talking shop with its creator. Our cups runneth over. https://github.com/macmixing/keyvox/

checking in

windows (kotlin multi platform) => https://github.com/maceip/daydream

parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2

Yeah, but mine... Oh. Hello. sighs It's been three weeks since I tried to add feature to my version of the app. I don't miss it. I like this new life. Sober.

Are there any better than Superwhisper? Because I haven't found any.

hahaha I’m glad I’m just a procedurally generated NPC

I built one for cross platform — using parakeet mlx or faster whisper. :)

My name is Cole and I have a speech to text app.

When I most recently abandoned it, the trigger word would fire one time in five.

Oh to be 20-something and do a bunch of free work for your portfolio again

Microsoft OneNote had this back in 2007 or so, granted the speech to text model wasn't nearly as advanced as they are now.

I was actually on the OneNote team when they were transitioning to an online only transcription model because there was no one left to maintain the on device legacy system.

It wasn't any sort of planned technical direction, just a lack of anyone wanting to maintain the old system.

The accuracy is much lower though.

I've switched away from Gboard to Futo on Android and exclusively use MacWhisper on MacOS instead of the default Apple transcription model.

Interesting. My Pixel 7 transcription is barely usable for me. Makes way too many mistakes and defeats the purpose of me not having to type, but maybe that's just my experience.

The latest open source local STT models people are running on devices are significantly more robust (e.g. whisper models, parakeet models, etc.). So background noise, mumbling, and/or just not having a perfect audio environment doesn't trip up the SoTA models as much (all of them still do get tripped up).

I work in voice AI and am using these models (both proprietary and local open source) every day. Night and day different for me.

How does it compare to the more well established https://github.com/cjpais/handy? Are there any stand out features (for either option)? What was the reason for writing your own rather than using or improving existing software?

I've been running whisper large-v3 on an m2 max through a self-hosted endpoint and honestly the accuracy is good enough that i stopped bothering with cleanup models. The bigger annoyance for me was latency on longer chunks, like anything over 30 seconds starts feeling sluggish even with metal acceleration. Haven't tried whisperkit specifically but curious how it handles longer audio compared to the full model.

Thanks for sharing! I was literally getting ready to build, essentially, this. Now it looks like I don't have to!

Have you ever considered using a foot-pedal for PTT?

Apple incidentally already has native STT, but for some reason they just don't use a decent model yet.

looks like there's a nearly identically named one for Hyprland

Also, wish it was on nixpkgs, where at least it will be almost guaranteed to build forever =)

I have a few qualms with this app:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

Yeah props to Handy, really nice tool.

More than one solution can exist for the same problem.

This is ideal for my use case, yeah. No need to fiddle around with another app's UI.

Whisper is still old reliable - I find that it's less prone to hallucinations than newer models, easier to run (on AMD GPU, via whisper.cpp), and only ~2x slower than parakeet. I even bothered to "port" Parakeet to Nemo-less pytorch to run it on my GPU, and still went back to Whisper after a couple of days.

Whisper is very good in many languages.

It's also in many flavours, from tiny to turbo, and so can fit many system profiles.

That's what makes it unique and hard to replace.

same, even have kokoro for speech back to text for home assistant and parakeet on mac os through voice ink.

Also vibe coded a way to use parakeet from the same parakeet piper server on my grapheneos phone https://zach.codes/p/vibe-coding-a-wispr-clone-in-20-minutes

Whisper supports a prompt, you can put your "Donold" there.

https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/examples/whisper_prom...

I've found the "corrections" feature works well for most of the jargon and misspelling use cases. Can you give it a try and let me know edge cases?

My experience is that Aqua voice does a good job of this with custom dictionary and replacements.

Handy is an awesome project, highly recommended - many of our engineers and PMs use it! CJ, Handy's creator, recently joined us as a Builder in Residence at Mozilla.ai. So for those interested in deploying a more raw/lightweight approach to local speech-to-text (or other multimodal) models, feel free to check out llamafile - which includes whisperfile, a single-file whisper.cpp + cosmopolitan framework-based executable. We're hoping to build some bridges between the two projects as well. https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile

Yup, Handy is the one that made me stop looking for local open source alternatives to Wispr Flow.

I'll give a shoutout as well to Glimpse: https://github.com/LegendarySpy/Glimpse

I’d also be interested to know what the impetus was for developing ghost-pepper, which looks relatively recent, given that Handy exists and has been pretty well received.

Extra bonus is that Handy lets add an automatic LLM post-processor. This is very handy for the Parakeet V3 model, which can sometimes have issues where it repeats words or makes recognition errors for example, duplicating the recognition of a single word a dozen dozen dozen dozen dozen dozen dozen dozen times.

Handy is awesome! I used it for quite a while before Claude Code added voice support. Solid software, very good linux and mac integration. Shoutout to Parakeet models as well, extremely fast and solid models for their relatively modest memory requirements.

I love it. I use it all the time to communicate to my agents via opencode.

I love and have been using handy for a while too, what we need is this for mobile apps I don't think there's any free apps and native dictation is not always fully local and not as good.

I use handy all day long as a software engineer, and recommended it to all of my team members. I love it.

Handy is fantastic.

Parakeet supports japanese now, but I cant find a version ported to apple silicone yet.

Are you running Parakeet with VoiceInk[0]?

[0]: https://github.com/beingpax/VoiceInk

Right, and if you're on MacOS you can use it for free with Hex: https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex

I have been using Parakeet with MacWhisper's hold-to-talk on a MacBook Neo and it's been awesome.

And indeed, Ghost Pepper supports parakeet v3

I haven't used this one but WisprFlow is vastly better than the built-in functionality on MacOS. Apple is way behind even startups, even for fundamental AI functionality like transcribing speech

I like this idea and it should work -- whatever microphone you have on should be able to hear the speaker. LMK if not (e.g., are you wearing headphones? if so, the mic can't hear the speaker)

Sure, Chatterbox TTS Server is rather high quality: https://github.com/devnen/Chatterbox-TTS-Server

You could hook it up to some workflow over the local API depending on how you want to dump the text, but the web UI is good too.

The Show HN by the author was at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44145564

And many people are mailing in Codex and Claude Code generated PRs - myself included. Fingers crossed, I suppose.

Slop

Exactly my question. I double-tap the control button and macOS does native, local TTS dictation pretty well. (Similar to Keyboard > Enable Dictation setting on iOS.)

The macOS built-in TTS (dictation) seems better than all the 3rd party, local apps I tried in the past that people raved about. I have tried several.

Is this better somehow?

If the 3rd party apps did streaming with typing in place and corrections within a reasonable window when they understand things better given more context, that would be cool. Theoretically, a custom model or UX could be "better" than what comes free built into macOS (more accurate or customizable).

But when I contacted the developer of my favorite one they said that would be pretty hard to implement due to having to go back and make corrections in the active field, etc.

I assume streaming STT in these utilities for Mac will get better at some point, but I haven't seen it yet (been waiting). It seems these tools generally are not streaming, e.g. they want you to finish speaking first before showing you anything. Which doesn't work for me when I'm dictating. I want to see what I've been saying lately, to jog my memory about what I've just said and help guide the next thing I'm about to say. I certainly don't want to split my attention by manually toggling the control (whether PTT or not) periodically to indicate "ok, you can render what I just said now".

I guess "hold-to-talk" tools are for delivering discrete, fully formed messages, not for longer, running dictation.

AFAICT, TFA is focused on hold-to-talk as the differentiator, over double-tap to begin speaking and double-tap to end speaking?

Thanks! We currently have 2 multi-lingual options available: - Whisper small (multilingual) (~466 MB, supports many languages) - Parakeet v3 (25 languages) (~1.4 GB, supports 25 languages via FluidAudio)

I've been using Chirp which uses parakeet on Windows. Learned about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930659

Works great for me!

Handy has Windows support. https://handy.computer/

Because like all other modern Macs, the GPU in my Mac uses the same API as the GPU in your Mac.

Also, on a Mac with 32GB of RAM, 24GB of that (75%) is available to the GPU, and that makes the models run much faster. On my 64GB MacBook Pro, 48GB is available to the GPU. Have you priced an nvidia GPU with 48GB of RAM? It’s simply cheaper to do this on Macs.

Macs are just better for getting started with this kind of thing.