AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to OWhisper – Ollama for realtime speech-to-text
Hello everyone. This is Yujong from the Hyprnote team (https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote). We built OWhisper for 2 reasons: (Also outlined in https://docs.hyprnote.com/owhisper/what-is-this) (1). While working with on-device, realtime speech-to-text, we found there isn't tooling that exists to download / run the model in a practical way. (2). Also, we got frequent requests to provide a way to plug in custom STT endpoints to the Hyprnote desktop app, just like doing it with OpenAI-compatible LLM endpoints. The (2) part is still kind of WIP, but…
OWhisper is a tool for running speech-to-text locally on a device in real time. Built by the Hyprnote team, it addresses the lack of practical tooling for downloading and running Whisper models. The tool provides a… 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 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
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superwhisper▲274Extremely accurate, AI powered voice-to-text for macOS
2023 · superwhisper.com · its alternatives →
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Free & fast alternative to Wispr Flow. Contribute to zachlatta/freeflow development by creating an account on GitHub.
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Extremely accurate, AI powered voice-to-text
2024 · superwhisper.com · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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MacWhisper▲123High quality text transcription with OpenAI's whisper on Mac
2023 · goodsnooze.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
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GoWhisper▲150Cross-platform, privacy-first audio transcription app
2023 · gowhisper.io · its alternatives →
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OpenWispr▲190100% local open source AI speech-to-text model
2025 · openwhispr.com · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! Last year the project I launched here got a lot of good feedback on creating speech to speech AI on the ESP32. Recently I revamped the whole stack, iterated on that feedback and made our project fully open-source—all of the client, hardware, firmware code. This Github repo turns an ESP32-S3 into a realtime AI speech companion using the OpenAI Realtime API, Arduino WebSockets, Deno Edge Functions, and a full-stack web interface. You can talk to your own custom AI character, and it responds instantly. I couldn't find a resource that helped set up a reliable, secure websocket (WSS) AI…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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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 · 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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Hi HN. This is Yujong from Hyprnote. Hyprnote is an open-source, local-first macOS app that you can use for meetings. - It uses Mic + System Audio for audio sources. - Whisper (small-en-q8) + Llama (3b-q8) for transcription + summarization. Some interesting bits: - Extension & plugin system that you can use to create widgets (inspired by VSCode). - Built with Libsql. Will enable DB sync across cloud/devices in the future. There are still some rough edges, but I thought it is worth sharing the concept and getting feedback. We have an interesting onboarding video. Please try it out!…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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TypeWhisper - Free local speech-to-textfree tier, from $5.42/mo▲6Hey HN, I'm Marco, the creator of TypeWhisper. TypeWhisper is a free, open-source speech-to-text app for macOS and Windows. Everything runs locally on your machine - no cloud, no telemetry, no data collection. Your voice never leaves your device. What makes it different: - Multiple engines, your choice: On macOS: WhisperKit, Parakeet TDT, Apple SpeechAnalyzer. On Windows: Parakeet TDT, Canary 180M Flash. All run on CPU, no GPU needed. You can also plug in cloud APIs (OpenAI, Groq, Deepgram) if you prefer. - Context-aware profiles: Set per-app and per-website overrides for language, engine,…
Feb 2026 · typewhisper.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, we've been working with OpenAI for the past few months on the new Realtime API. The goal is to give everyone access to the same stack that underpins Advanced Voice in the ChatGPT app. Under the hood it works like this: - A user's speech is captured by a LiveKit client SDK in the ChatGPT app - Their speech is streamed using WebRTC to OpenAI’s voice agent - The agent relays the speech prompt over websocket to GPT-4o - GPT-4o runs inference and streams speech packets (over websocket) back to the agent - The agent relays generated speech using WebRTC back to the user’s device The…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Using threaded emscripten to speed up the generation and offload the main loop. No SIMD or other optimizations. Might work faster with #enable-experimental-webassembly-features enabled. Tested in x86 Chrome and Firefox, Apple Silicon Safari Run it yourself: https://github.com/lxe/ggml/tree/wasm-demo Thanks, https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml,
2023 · lxe.co · its alternatives →
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WhisperWizard▲149Speech to text with smarter transcription
2024 · whisperwizard.com · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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OpenBrief is basically a GUI for yt-dlp with some AI on top — paste a link, it downloads locally, and transcription and voice generation run with local AI on your machine. Summaries and chat over the transcript use an LLM, which is bring-your-own-key for now. It's open source and free.
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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A realtime, live transcription and translation app that works locally using a browser. Built with Huggingface Transformer.js and Supabase Realtime. Realtime in-browser speech-to-text with OpenAI Whisper! Broadcast to subscribed clients with Supabase Realtime. Translate to 200 languages with Meta's NLLB-200! Demo & source code https://supabase.link/realtime-ai-yt Shoutout to @xenovacom for building Transformers.js and providing plenty of examples at https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers.js/en/index#example...
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Free, local voice-to-text transcription using OpenAI Whisper
Mar 2026 · overseedai.github.io · its alternatives →
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Video demonstration: https://youtu.be/bJFa5HOmhl4 I created a demo involving ChatGPT, OpenAI's Whisper running on-device for speech-to-text (because why not?), and ARKit. By defining a custom JavaScript environment with JavaScriptCore and describing it to ChatGPT, I was able to get it to produce functioning scripts that instantiate and manipulate 3D objects. Sketchfab is used to import 3D assets on the fly. Google Poly had a much better catalog of assets for this sort of thing but sadly, it's no longer available. The README.md describes how it all works but the gist of it is…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Free, open-source dictation that runs on your machine
Sep 2026 · whispaste.de · 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 →