Alternatives
Products that do what Open-source transcription that costs $0.02/hour instead of $30/month does
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…
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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
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2022 · freesubtitles.ai
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Schibsted created a transcription service for our journalists to transcribe audio interviews and podcasts really quick.
2023 · github.com
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Hi HN, I wanted to share my first open-source project with you all: WhisperCat . WhisperCat is a small desktop application for recording audio and transcribing it using OpenAI's Whisper API. I built this because I needed something simple and reliable for my own transcription workflows, and now I'm hoping it might be useful to others as well. It's still pretty early stage, but it works well for basic audio recording and transcription tasks. What It Does: Lets you record audio with your preferred microphone. Transcribes audio files automatically via Whisper (OpenAI's transcription API).…
2025 · github.com
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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!
2023 · twitter.com
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