Alternatives
Products that do what Yap – OSS on-device voice dictation for macOS with no model to download does
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…
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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
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On-device voice recorder that transcribes + exports Markdown
Jun 2026 · fieldbw.com
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I built a menu bar app for voice typing on macOS that's 100% on-device. No cloud, no subscription, no data collection. It uses Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer framework (macOS 26 Tahoe), which means: - Speech models are system-managed, not bundled – the app is just 1.5MB - Models run outside your app's memory space - Automatic punctuation and optional emoji conversion Press a hotkey, speak, and your words appear in real-time in whatever app has focus. An audio-reactive screen border shows you're recording. MIT licensed: https://github.com/leftouterjoins/voicewrite I built this…
Jan 2026 · leftouterjoins.github.io
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The app store for voice native apps that lives in your notch
29d ago · voiceos.com
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Local transcripts with speaker labels, timestamps, + export
Dec 2025 · whispersnapper.com
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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
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