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Products that do what I made a local transcription app for your Mac does

Hello all, I made a small transcription app for your Mac based on OpenAI’s Whisper. Would love some feedback. My plan is to make it easy to load weights from any fine-tuned whisper model to enable specialized dictation for any subfield. It’s still early in development. Thanks!

  1. 1WO

    Hey HN! Braden here, creator of Whispering, an open-source speech-to-text app. I really like dictation. For years, I relied on transcription tools that were almost good, but they were all closed-source. Even a lot of them that claimed to be “local” or “on-device” were still black boxes that left me wondering where my audio really went. So I built Whispering. It’s open-source, local-first, and most importantly, transparent with your data. Your data is stored locally on your device, and your audio goes directly from your machine to a local provider (Whisper C++, Speaches, etc.) or your chosen…

    2025 · github.com

  2. 2

    High quality text transcription with OpenAI's whisper on Mac

    2023

  3. 3IM
  4. 4

    Offline AI Speech to Text Transcription for iOS & macOS

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  5. 5

    Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

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    Local transcripts with speaker labels, timestamps, + export

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  7. 7IM

    A few years ago, right after high school, I decided to try to make a simultaneous translation app for Android as a side project, it took longer than expected (about 2 years) and I had to make a lot of compromises (I had to use Google's API and therefore make users use a developer key because at the time there were no free solutions for speech recognition and translation that had good quality). At the end of university, I decided to pick it up again and finally, using OpenAi's Whisper for speech recognition and Meta's NLLB for translation (with both running locally on the phone), I managed to…

    2024 · github.com

  8. 8PO

    Hi HN, OpenAI recently released a model for automatic speech recognition called Whisper [0]. I decided to reimplement the inference of the model from scratch using C/C++. To achieve this I implemented a minimalistic tensor library in C and ported the high-level architecture of the model in C++. The entire code is less than 8000 lines of code and is contained in just 2 source files without any third-party dependencies. The Github project is here: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp With this implementation I can very easily build and run the model - “make…

    2022 · github.com

  9. 9

    Free local transcription that is 100% Private

    17d ago · hynote.ai

  10. 10

    On-device Mac dictation that types into any app

    Aug 2026 · zenproducts.ai

  11. 11
    Walkie228

    Free local AI voice dictation tool

    Apr 2026

  12. 12

    Local real-time voice transcription for Mac

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  13. 13

    Local dictation for macOS without the subscription

    May 2026 · tonguetype.app

  14. 1401

    Hey HN! I've been working on a side project to create an audio transcription API based on the OpenAI whisper model. Sign up link: https://whisperapi.com I tried to make the API really easy to use and get setup with. Also, because the Whisper model is so good, turns out I can offer the service for about 75% cheaper than what seems like the industry average. I'm always looking to make improvements, so would appreciate any feedback anyone has!

    2022 · whisperapi.com

  15. 15

    Local push-to-talk dictation for Mac

    Jul 2026 · leftinverse.com

  16. 16
    Juno167

    Free, local AI powered Voice to Text w/ live transcriptions

    Jun 2026 · usejuno.co

  17. 17

    Speech to text with smarter transcription

    2024

  18. 18
    Spokenly178

    Type 4x faster with your voice

    2025

  19. 19

    Not just dictation and private AI voice toolkit

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  20. 20

    Voice transcription lives in the Mac notch

    May 2026 · coddo.ai

  21. 21OW

    I built Open WhisperScribe after struggling with the complexity, paywalls, or limitations of most speech-to-text tools for macOS and elsewhere. My main requirements were: Simple, <5-min setup Runs fully offline, locally (no data leaves your machine) Works seamlessly in any app — just press a hotkey, speak, and your words appear where your cursor is (code editors, terminal, you name it) Fast and distraction-free It uses OpenAI’s Whisper model under the hood, but wraps it in a lightweight CLI tool that sits quietly in the background. The project is open source (Apache 2.0). Setup is a single…

    2025 · github.com

  22. 22
    Aloud118

    Turn spoken feedback into tasks your coding agent can run

    17d ago · aloud.sh

  23. 23
    Dictato93

    Local instant voice-to-text for every Mac

    Feb 2026

  24. 24
    Stet68

    Smart open-source dictation that sounds like you, not AI.

    Apr 2026 · stet.me

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