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Alternatives

Products that do what Live coaching app for remote SWE interviews, uses Whisper and GPT-4 does

Posting from a throwaway account to maintain privacy. This project is a salvo against leetcode-style interviews that require candidates to study useless topics and confidently write code in front of a live audience, in order to get a job where none of that stuff matters. Cheetah is an AI-powered macOS app designed to assist users during remote software engineering interviews by providing real-time, discreet coaching and integration with CoderPad. It uses Whisper for audio transcription and GPT-4 to generate hints/answers. The UI is intentionally minimal to allow for discreet use during…

  1. 1

    Speech to text with smarter transcription

    2024

  2. 2
    Macaly637

    Apps built by conversations, not code

    2025 · macaly.com

  3. 3

    Free local transcription that is 100% Private

    17d ago · hynote.ai

  4. 4
    SKI584

    Free voice coding for Claude Code, Codex and more

    Jul 2026 · heyski.io

  5. 5

    Native ChatGPT for MacOS

    2024 · thinkbuddy.ai

  6. 6WO

    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

  7. 7GP

    I built this because I wanted to see how far I could get with a voice-to-text app that used 100% local models so no data left my computer. I've been using a ton for coding and emails. Experimenting with using it as a voice interface for my other agents too. 100% open-source MIT license, would love feedback, PRs, and ideas on where to take it.

    Apr 2026 · github.com

  8. 8IB

    Hi HN, I built this out of frustration of the evergrowing list of AI models and features to try and to fit my workflow. The visual approach clicks for me so i went with it, it provides more freedom and control of the outcome, because predictable results and increased productivity is what I’m after when using conversational AI. The app is packed with features, my most used are prompt library, voice input and text search, narration is useful too. The app is local-first and works right in the browser, no sign up needed and it's absolutely free to try. BYOAK – bring your own API Keys. Let me…

    2024 · grafychat.com

  9. 9OF

    I wanted a voice-to-text app but didn't trust any of the proprietary ones with my privacy. So I decided to see if I could vibe code it with 0 macOS app & Swift experience. It uses a local binary of whisper.cpp (a fast implementation of OpenAI's Whisper voice-to-text model in C++). Github: https://github.com/richardwu/openwhisper I also decided to take this as an opportunity to compare 3 agentic coding harnesses: Cursor w/ Opus 4.6: - Best one-shot UI by far - Didn't get permissioning correct - Had issues making the "Cancel recording" hotkey being turned on all the…

    Feb 2026 · github.com

  10. 10
    Aloud118

    Turn spoken feedback into tasks your coding agent can run

    17d ago · aloud.sh

  11. 11CA

    I've long had a dislike for leetcode interviews on both sides of the coin. Project-based interviews can also be challenging because it can end up filtering out folks who don't want to spend several hours building something in their free time. I met up with a friend last year -- a very senior dev -- who had taken some time off to study leetcode exercises while preparing for FAANG interviews. It struck me that one of the key measures of whether a candidate is a fit for a team is rather synthetic. CodeRev.app is a simple, lightweight tool that helps teams evaluate candidates using code reviews.…

    2024 · coderev.app

  12. 12G4

    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

  13. 13

    Offline AI Speech to Text Transcription for iOS & macOS

    2025

  14. 14IM

    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

  15. 15SA

    Hey HN, I built superwhisper out of frustration with the native dictation capabilities of macOS. Inaccurate, required manual punctuation, didnt activate in some contexts or would have audio capture issues. I wanted a replacement that worked offline, had cross language support, was configurable and worked in any application. Under the hood the app is using whisper.cpp, which runs really well on the Apple Silicon chips. You can use the base and standard size models for free, larger models sizes and languages other than english are paid. Let me know what you think! For context, I launched this…

    2023 · superwhisper.com

  16. 16
    Juno167

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

    Jun 2026 · usejuno.co

  17. 17

    High quality text transcription with OpenAI's whisper on Mac

    2023

  18. 18PS

    Welcome to Project S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y. This is a project that allows anyone to easily build their own self-hosted J.A.R.V.I.S-like voice assistant. In my mind vocal computing is the future of human-computer interaction and by open sourcing this code I hope to expedite us on that path. I have had a blast working on this so far and I'm excited to continue to build with it. It uses whisper.cpp [1], Coqui TTS [2] and OpenAI [3] to do speech-to-text, text-to-text and text-to-speech inference all 100% locally (except for text-to-text). In the future I plan to swap out OpenAI for llama.cpp [4]. It is…

    2023 · github.com

  19. 19BC

    I know there are various tools that are supposed to make this easy, but I couldn't find anything that did everything I wanted, so I made this today for fun. The web-based offerings all take forever and seem flaky, and you need to process one video at a time, with no control over the transcription settings. In contrast, my script lets you convert a whole playlist in bulk with full control over everything. It's truly easy to use-- you can clone the repo, install to a venv, and be generating a folder full of high quality transcript text files in under 5 minutes. All you need to do is supply the…

    2023 · github.com

  20. 20CF

    This is a small project i made years ago and updated to whisper last year, i still use it from time to time and thought it might be useful to others, or just put the idea out there for someone better than me to make a better implementation!

    2024 · github.com

  21. 21

    Local push-to-talk dictation for Mac

    Jul 2026 · leftinverse.com

  22. 22

    Voice transcription lives in the Mac notch

    May 2026 · coddo.ai

  23. 23

    WisprFlow for vibe coders w/ voice shortcuts

    Feb 2026

  24. 24

    Not just dictation and private AI voice toolkit

    Apr 2026

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