AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Silkwave
AI transcription app and note taker for macOS. Record meetings, lectures, and podcasts or import audio files you already have, transcribe in 10+ languages using on-device Apple models, see who said what with on-device speaker identification, get ChatGPT-powered summaries, and chat with your recordin
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 2 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
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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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Wave▲298Turn your voice into text — local or cloud, your choice
Jun 2026 · wave.mxv.sh · 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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Heeey! I built a macOS copilot that has been useful to me, so I open sourced it in case others would find it useful too. It's pretty simple: - Use a keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot of your active macOS window and start recording the microphone. - Speak your question, then press the keyboard shortcut again to send your question + screenshot off to OpenAI Vision - The Vision response is presented in-context/overlayed over the active window, and spoken to you as audio. - The app keeps running in the background, only taking a screenshot/listening when activated by keyboard…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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AI Audio Kit▲92Easy audio transcription from your macOS desktop
2024 · aiaudiokit.pages.dev · its alternatives →
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Whisper Notes▲115Offline AI Speech to Text Transcription for iOS & macOS
2025 · whispernotes.app · its alternatives →
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Spellar for iOS▲304AI Conversation companion and note taker in your pocket
2025 · appsflyer.spellar.ai · its alternatives →
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Local transcripts with speaker labels, timestamps, + export
Dec 2025 · whispersnapper.com · its alternatives →
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Transcribe audio from your device microphone using 100% local / client-side processing.
2023 · ermine.ai · its alternatives →
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VibeSonic▲64Not just dictation and private AI voice toolkit
Apr 2026 · vibesonic.ai · its alternatives →
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Synopsulefrom $1.99/mo▲125On device private AI meeting transcripts
Jun 2026 · synopsule.com · its alternatives →
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Spoke▲102Dictate into any Mac app by holding a key. Spoke runs fully on-device using local AI — no cloud, no account, no subscription. $9.99 one-time.
Mar 2026 · usespoke.app · its alternatives →
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NoteWave▲94AI-powered transcription & summaries for any meeting
2025 · notewave.co.za · its alternatives →
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I was laid off recently and, instead of looking for another job right away, I decided to build something I always wanted: a transcription tool that respects user privacy. Existing transcription tools often require internet connectivity, send your private audio to cloud servers, or lock you into monthly subscriptions. I wanted something different—so I built WhisperBuddy, a privacy-first AI transcription app that runs entirely on your machine. WhisperBuddy uses OpenAI’s Whisper model (see: https://github.com/openai/whisper). While the model may not always deliver the…
2025 · whisperbuddy.com · its alternatives →
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Transcribe + summarize audio and phone calls in any language
2024 · its alternatives →
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Zen Whisper▲136On-device Mac dictation that types into any app
Aug 2026 · zenproducts.ai · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! I wanted to share this OSS project I've been working on. It's called Yap and its a small menu-bar app for macOS that does voice to text for any input. You'll set a hotkey, press it, talk, press it again, and the text gets pasted into whatever field you were in. Everything runs locally and never leaves your computer. Fully OSS and MIT licensed. With macOS 26, Apple recently added two new APIs, SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber, that do streaming on-device speech to text using models the OS ships and manages. So the app ships no model of its own and loads nothing before the first…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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On-device or Cloud transcription powered by OpenAI's Whisper
2023 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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Dictatofree tier, from $20.82/mo▲93I built a macOS dictation app where everything runs on-device. Transcription, auto-correct, translation. No audio or text leaves your machine. It ships with 4 transcription engines you can swap between: WhisperKit (99 languages), NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B (25 European languages, fastest of the bunch), Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (30 languages), and Apple Speech on macOS 26+. They all run through CoreML/Metal. Whisper is the most versatile, Parakeet wins on raw latency for European languages, Qwen3 does better with CJK. I went with a protocol-based architecture so you pick the engine that fits your…
Feb 2026 · dicta.to · its alternatives →
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My friend built this and I'm blown away with how much fun it is and the high level of polish. It renders 9 different strange attractors (Lorenz, Rössler, Aizawa, Chen, etc.) as particle systems — thousands of particles tracing chaotic paths in real time. You can rotate and zoom with touch/trackpad in 3D. The sound is the part that surprised me. It's not a soundtrack — the audio is generated from the motion itself using spatial audio, so tones shift as the attractor's behavior changes and the sound moves around you as you rotate the form. Put on headphones. The Playdate version uses the…
Jun 2026 · fieldbw.com · its alternatives →
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Sayline▲83I built a voice dictation app for macOS mostly because I was tired of how awful Siri is and I didn't want to pay a subscription for cloud tools. The app uses NVIDIA's Parakeet v3 (TDT) as the primary engine. Inference is handled by the FluidAudio library. It's insanely fast on M-series chips. For Intel users, I added local Whisper support ranging from Tiny up to Large v3 Turbo (quantized to save space). The interesting part was the AI integration. I originally tried to pipeline the ASR output into Apple's Intelligence Foundation Model. It was a nightmare, because the content moderation…
Jan 2026 · sayline.app · 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 →