Alternatives
Products that do what Cyrinx (36kbps Acoustic Transport) does
Working with Fable 5, a MacBook, and a Pixel phone, I built an acoustic transport library that is several orders of magnitude faster than existing SoTA open source options like ggwave, quiet, minimodem, or Chirp. Paper: https://cyrinx.org/cyrinx-acoustic-link.pdf Apache 2.0 source: https://github.com/dweekly/cyrinx
- 1G4
About six months ago, I started working on a project to fine-tune Whisper locally on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio with a limited compute budget. I got into it. The problem I had at the time was I had 15,000 hours of audio data in Google Cloud Storage, and there was no way I could fit all the audio onto my local machine, so I built a system to stream data from my GCS to my machine during training. Gemma 3n came out, so I added that. Kinda went nuts, tbh. Then I put it on the shelf. When Gemma 4 came out a few days ago, I dusted it off, cleaned it up, broke out the Gemma part from the Whisper…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 2TN
Kitten TTS (https://github.com/KittenML/KittenTTS) is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We had a thread last year here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44807868. Today we're releasing three new models with 80M, 40M and 14M parameters. The largest model (80M) has the highest quality. The 14M variant reaches new SOTA in expressivity among similar sized models, despite being <25MB in size. This release is a major upgrade from the previous one and supports English text-to-speech applications in…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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Run Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (125B MoE, 104 GB at 4-bit) on Macs with a fraction of that RAM by streaming experts from SSD. MLX + Swift, Ollama-compatible API. - carloslfu/slotstream
5d ago · github.com
- 5MO
I wanted to share our new speech to text model, and the library to use them effectively. We're a small startup (six people, sub-$100k monthly GPU budget) so I'm proud of the work the team has done to create streaming STT models with lower word-error rates than OpenAI's largest Whisper model. Admittedly Large v3 is a couple of years old, but we're near the top the HF OpenASR leaderboard, even up against Nvidia's Parakeet family. Anyway, I'd love to get feedback on the models and software, and hear about what people might build with it.
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 6LT
2016 · brian-armstrong.github.io
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- 8FT
I wrote a small local tool to transcribe audio notes (Whisper/Parakeet). Code: https://github.com/bilawalriaz/lazy-notes I wanted to process raw transcripts locally without OpenRouter. Llama 3.2 3B with a prompt was decent but incomplete, so I tried SFT. I fine-tuned Llama 3.2 3B to clean/analyze dictation and emit structured JSON (title, tags, entities, dates, actions). Data: 13 real memos → Kimi K2 gold JSON → ~40k synthetic + gold; keys canonicalized. Chutes.ai (5k req/day). Training: RTX 4090 24GB, ~4h, LoRA (r=128, α=128, dropout=0.05), max seq 2048,…
2025 · bilawal.net
- 9SG
2012 · alpha.soundkeep.com
- 10IB
I originally added this to my site to speed up my video editing process. Last year I started a youtube channel and for some of my longer videos it's annoying to rely on youtube or capcut to transcribe when Whisper is open source. Capcut also recently updated their T&Cs to say they own your content if you use their app, so I cancelled my subscription. Another use-case I have is recording my claude prompts as audio, transcribing them, and then pasting them into my terminal. I mostly work on the CLI (claude, ffmpeg, whisper), but I wanted to make a browser version. Not reinventing the wheel…
2025 · meetcosmos.com
- 11V
Hello HN! I’m a bachelors student pursuing Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Signal processing and during the year I had the goal to build my first AI Tool and launch it. I got inspired by how capable Whisper is, and combined the Whisper CPP Bindings along with FFMPEG.Wasm to create a tool that is capable of transcribing and captioning video files that contain one or more video tracks. Along with that, I’ve also added the support for transcribing audio files with the option to export those outputs as .SRT, .WebVTT or simply a text file. All done privately on a user’s web browser with…
2023
- 12IB
Hi HN! Since the launch of JigsawStack.com, we've been trying to dive deeper into fully managed AI APIs built and fine tuned for specific use cases. Audio/video transcription was one of the more basic things and we wanted the best open source model at this point it is OpenAI's whisper large v3 model based on the number of languages it supports and its accuracy. The thing is, the model is huge and requires tons of GPU power for it to run efficiently at scale. Even OpenAI doesn't provide an API for their best transcription model while only providing whisper v2 at a pretty high price. I…
2024 · github.com
- 13DO
YO, I’m Ryan, lead author. I’ve been contributing open source generative audio stuff for a while now, audio reactive Comfy nodes, extended ACEstep support in Comfy, etc.. I just opened-sourced a new audio project that I've been working on for a few months and I want to tell y'all about it. WHAT IS IS DEMON: Diffusion Engine for Musical Orchestrated Noise This is StreamDiffusion but with audio instead of images, and ACEStep 1.5 instead of Stable Diffusion. It’s responsive enough that you can play it like an instrument, and remix in near real-time. I also distilled the ACEStep VAE: it’s faster…
May 2026 · daydreamlive.github.io
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I made this after seeing someone posit the idea online yesterday over lunch then spent some time refining it. So far it's pretty impressive IMO! Right now I am running Qwen3-30B-A3B on my 24gb unified memory m4 MacBook Pro at 50 tok/sec and this should definitely not be working for such a large model on my middling hardware. Things are detailed in the README to get up and running and DESIGN.md has details on all the choices and such made along the way.
23d ago · github.com
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2018 · inanimate.world
- 16VF
Hey HN, I'm Josiah. We love voice dictation, but wanted an open source version for transparency, privacy, and something that everyone could contribute to. So we built Voquill, an open source alternative to WisprFlow, Monologue, and Willow. It lets you dictate into any desktop app. Press a hotkey, talk, text gets inserted. You can run Whisper locally, use our server, or wire up any provider you want (OpenAI, Claude, Groq, OpenRouter, whatever). You have full control over where your data goes. Runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Open source, AGPLv3, built with Tauri and Rust. We're working on a…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 17WA
new in development, feedback highly appreciated =)
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 18OS
I built Whispering because I believe transcription is too fundamental a tool to be locked behind paywalls. It's a cross-platform desktop and web transcription app that turns speech into text with a keyboard shortcut, among other things. The app lets you bring your own API key (OpenAI, Groq, etc.) and make direct calls. If you want complete privacy, it also supports local transcription. Either way, your audio never goes through any middleman servers. It's super lightweight (~22MB), built with Svelte 5 and Tauri, and works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. I've been using it daily for the past few…
2025 · github.com
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I'm a 23yo solo dev from Spain with a passion for UI/UX and I built Gramola, a music dock for macOS that is there when you need it. No more opening a music app to change what you're listening to; just move your mouse to the edge of the screen, and all your music is there in a gorgeous CoverFlow style, or ready to be instantly searched. Fully usable with a mouse, but also fully usable with keyboard, accessibility built in, and both Spotify and Apple Music support as well as local tracks via the Music app. Free to try for 7 days! I would love to know what you think :) Please feel free to…
16d ago · apps.apple.com
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Ultra-efficient generative LoFi engine in Rust for deep work
Jul 2026 · wparrado.github.io
- 21SL
For speech-to-text, large-language-model inference and text-to-speech I created three wrapper libraries in C/C++ (using Whisper.cpp, Llama.cpp and Piper). Follow the URL to see an example that shows how to use these libraries for a speech-to-text, LLM inference, text-to-speech pipeline. Windows and Linux are supported.
Sep 2025 · github.com
- 22TU
I’m Leif and I wanted to share the new product I’ve been working on recently, TurboScribe (https://turboscribe.ai). It’s pretty simple: unlimited Whisper transcription (starting at $10 per month). It supports large-v2, small, and base models. And yeah, it really is unlimited. The most active users have transcribed 1k+ hours using Whisper large-v2 (in other words, you can transcribe all 30 x 24 x 60 = 43200 minutes of your life every month if you want!). When I started building this a few months ago, I got connected with some initial users with higher volume transcription needs…
2023 · turboscribe.ai
- 23WR
I've been working on a C-based open source sound engine as part of a book project and wanted an approachable way for people to try it out without having to build anything. Through the magic of emscripten (which I'm totally amazed by) and miniaudio (which has given me new life late in my development career), and a smidge of vibe-coded HTML/JS (web-dev is not my jam), this page will let you try out the tooling. I gave a lightning talk on the ASCII notation at ElixirConf EU last month here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnJ0osgiqWM There's a work-in-progress tutorial for…
May 2026 · octetta.github.io
- 24KS
Dec 2025 · github.com
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