Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A 4.8MB native iOS voice notes app built with SwiftUI
Hey HN, I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on called Convoxa. It’s a native iOS transcriber/summarizer. I had two main goals: keep it efficient and keep it private. THE TECH STACK 100% Swift & SwiftUI: No heavy cross-platform wrappers or bloated dependencies. Binary Size: The final build is only 4.8 MB. Transcription: Uses Apple's latest speech APIs for maximum privacy and efficiency. THE CHALLENGE: BYPASSING THE 4K CONTEXT LIMIT The biggest technical hurdle was working with Apple’s foundation models. The default context window is capped at 4096 tokens, which is practically…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 3 we have checked on their own sites, 3 of them free or with a free tier.
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Dictlyfree tier, from $29.99/mo▲240TL;DR: I built a native macOS dictation app that transcribes locally and instantly. Text appears as you speak (measured ~100 ms first‑character latency). No accounts, no servers, no tracking. Links: • Website: https://dictly.app • Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/dictly-no-keys-just-clarity/id... • Free download; optional Pro tier (pipelines, unlimited history, etc.) What it does Real‑time transcription — streaming text while you talk, not after you stop. Quick‑Capture Overlay (macOS) — global hotkey, drop text into any app/field.…
Oct 2025 · dictly.app · its alternatives →
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Pinch▲535Hey HN! I’m Christian, daily lurker and some might remember our original launch post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42935355). Today we're launching Pinch for Mac, which we believe is a step-change improvement in real-time AI translation. Our vision is to make cross-lingual conversations feel as natural as regular conversations. TL:DR During an online meeting, the app instantly transcribes and translates all audio you hear, and allows you to decide when you translate your voice and when you don't. It's invisible to others (like Granola), and works everywhere without any…
2025 · startpinch.com · its alternatives →
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Fast voice-to-text on 92 languages
2023 · lingvanex.com · its alternatives →
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HyNote for Mac▲368Free local transcription that is 100% Private
Aug 2026 · hynote.ai · its alternatives →
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Yapfree▲140Open-source voice dictation for Mac, fully on-device
Jul 2026 · frigade.com · its alternatives →
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Whisper Notes▲115Offline AI Speech to Text Transcription for iOS & macOS
2025 · whispernotes.app · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I'm a longtime web dev, but this is my first macOS app. Feedback is very welcome <3 I built TongueType because every dictation app I tried failed at least one of three things: it sent my audio to someone's cloud, it charged me monthly fee, or it felt clunky or enterprisy. The cloud thing kills it for anything sensitive. The subscription thing is insulting for what amounts to "Whisper + a hotkey." TongueType runs Whisper locally on Apple Silicon via CoreML. It's built to feel like a second keyboard: tap the hotkey, talk, let go, words appear. It sits in the menu bar (no dock icon, no…
May 2026 · tonguetype.app · its alternatives →
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Voice dictation that saves transcriptions on iPhone and Mac
Sep 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Sayline▲83I built a voice dictation app for macOS mostly because I was tired of how awful Siri is and I didn't want to pay a subscription for cloud tools. The app uses NVIDIA's Parakeet v3 (TDT) as the primary engine. Inference is handled by the FluidAudio library. It's insanely fast on M-series chips. For Intel users, I added local Whisper support ranging from Tiny up to Large v3 Turbo (quantized to save space). The interesting part was the AI integration. I originally tried to pipeline the ASR output into Apple's Intelligence Foundation Model. It was a nightmare, because the content moderation…
Jan 2026 · sayline.app · its alternatives →
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Dictate4Me▲76Instantly transcribe voice to text on iPhone, iPad and Mac
2024 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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Unlimited speech transcription, for meetings or deaf users
2021 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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Most transcriber apps were cloud-based, didn't store original audio, had confusing UI/UX, required logins, and costed a lot per month. Therefore this app is: - Low priced - No login - Native SwiftUI and MacOS APIs - Uses your own API keys for AI features I was in a bit of a catch-22 after college because I switched into Computer Science fairly late, and I had health and family issues. It was either apply to tons of jobs (and have the possibility of no job even after applying to hundreds of places) or build my skills and an income-generating app instead. Luckily LLMs got more advanced…
2025 · transcribetranslate.app · its alternatives →
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Dictatofree tier, from $20.82/mo▲93I built a macOS dictation app where everything runs on-device. Transcription, auto-correct, translation. No audio or text leaves your machine. It ships with 4 transcription engines you can swap between: WhisperKit (99 languages), NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B (25 European languages, fastest of the bunch), Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (30 languages), and Apple Speech on macOS 26+. They all run through CoreML/Metal. Whisper is the most versatile, Parakeet wins on raw latency for European languages, Qwen3 does better with CJK. I went with a protocol-based architecture so you pick the engine that fits your…
Feb 2026 · dicta.to · its alternatives →
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SpeakNotes▲71AI powered voice note transcriber & summarizer
2023 · speaknotes.io · its alternatives →
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Blazing fast keyboard for iOS now with GIFs and more
2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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We built SwiftAI, an open-source Swift library that lets you use Apple’s on-device LLMs when available (Apple opened access in June), and fall back to a cloud model when they aren’t available — all without duplicating code. SwiftAI gives you: - A single, model-agnostic API - An agent/tool loop - Strongly-typed structured outputs - Optional chat state Backstory: We started experimenting with Apple’s local models because they’re free (no API calls), private, and work offline. The problem: not all devices support them (older iPhones, Apple Intelligence disabled, low battery, etc.). That…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Dictura▲81Hold a key, speak, release- translated text at your cursor
Mar 2026 · dictura.com · its alternatives →
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Hey everyone, I'm excited to share a small project I hacked together last night: a local tool to transcribe and summarize voice memos from the iOS and MacOS Voice Memos app. What does it do? It's a lifesaver for anyone who, like me, records loads of voice memos and needs an efficient way to integrate these recordings into their note-keeping system (like Obsidian). Why is this useful? - No Cloud Processing: Your voice memos are processed entirely on your device, ensuring privacy and security. - Integration with Note-taking Apps: Directly pull transcribed and summarized content into your…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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We're seeing at Algolia a lot of developers implementing speech to text in their mobile apps, but didn't see much in the way of tooling to help them do it. So we set out to fix it, and wanted to release it not just for our users, but for any devs who want to do this. iOS/Swift: https://github.com/algolia/voice-overlay-ios/ Android/Kotlin: https://github.com/algolia/voice-overlay-android/ We wanted to take away the boilerplate necessary and leave the UI and other customizations in place. We've been looking forward to sharing this…
2018 · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, we're building Hyper: an iOS voice recorder for the conversations that matter too much to pause and take notes. 1:1s with your cofounder, coffee chats, standups, whiteboard sessions. One tap to record, and when you're done you get a summary, full transcript, and tappable action items (calendar events, reminders, email drafts) — no notes needed. We built this because at our last company (a robotics startup), the most consequential decisions happened spontaneously — in hallways, over lunch, on walks. None of it got captured. Every recorder we tried was built for scheduled Zoom calls…
Mar 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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We needed a speaker diarization solution that could run every few seconds alongside transcription on iOS and macOS. But native Swift support was either limited or locked behind paid licenses. Since diarization is a common need in speech-to-text workflows, we decided to open source our work and give back to the community. We initially tried sherpa-onnx, which works, but running both diarization and transcription models slowed down older devices. CPU-only inference just isn’t ideal for near real-time workloads, so we wanted the option to offload segmentation and speaker embedding to the GPU or…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Alt▲21Most AI notetakers have a 300 minute limit. This is not enough for uni students like me, or people who do remote work. So, I made a notetaker that runs the ASR model on-device. - Free with local ASR & LLM models - No transcription time limit - High accuracy for non-english speech, support for 100 languages - Real-time transcription - Zoom/Google Meet support - No internet needed - Efficient battery usage (~6 hours on full charge on my M2 Pro) This started as a small cli tool I made for myself, then many of my uni friends really liked it, so here it is as an app! I hope a lot of people…
Dec 2025 · altalt.io · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →