Open-source customizable AI voice dictation built on Pipecat
Tambourine is an open source, fully customizable voice dictation system that lets you control STT/ASR, LLM formatting, and prompts for inserting clean text into any app. I have been building this on the side for a few weeks. What motivated it was wanting a customizable version of Wispr Flow where I could fully control the models, formatting, and behavior of the system, rather than relying on a black box. Tambourine is built directly on top of Pipecat and relies on its modular voice agent framework. The back end is a local Python server that uses Pipecat to stitch together STT and LLM…
Open-source customizable AI voice dictation built on Pipecat launched on December 14, 2025 with 27 votes, #525 of 11,628 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Tambourine is an open-source voice dictation system that converts speech to text and inserts it into any application. Built on Pipecat's modular framework, it runs as a local Python server and lets users control speech recognition models, language models, formatting, and prompts rather than relying on proprietary alternatives. It's designed for developers and power users who want customization and transparency in their voice AI setup.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Your personal voice interface for any app. Speak naturally and your words appear wherever your cursor is, with fully customizable AI voice dictation. Open source alternative to Wispr Flow. - kstonekuan/tambourine-voice
In the maker’s words, at launch
Tambourine is an open source, fully customizable voice dictation system that lets you control STT/ASR, LLM formatting, and prompts for inserting clean text into any app. I have been building this on the side for a few weeks. What motivated it was wanting a customizable version of Wispr Flow where I could fully…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Tambourine VoiceFeb 2026 · tambourinevoice.com · ▲7Open-source personal voice interface for any app.
An open source framework for voice assistants2024 · github.com · ▲346I've been obsessed for the past ~year with the possibilities of talking to LLMs. I built a bunch of one-off prototypes, shared code on X, started a Meetup group in SF, and co-hosted a big hackathon. It turns out that there are a few low-level problems that everybody building conversational/real-time AI needs to solve on the way to building/shipping something that works well: low-latency media transport, echo cancellation, voice activity detection, phrase endpointing, pipelining data between models/services, handling voice interruptions, swapping out different…
Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust2025 · github.com · ▲591Hey 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…
Willow Frontier ProJul 2026 · willowvoice.com · ▲292Hey HN! We were part of YC S24, ended up pivoting around. Made dictation that worked really well, and decided to go all in on agentic. We've done two major things. 1. Scribe is a revamp of our product. Continually learns your style (can get into details if comments want). TLDR; we fingerprint based off your edits, and make dictation sound more and more like you. Post-trained Llama 3.1 8b. 2. Dictation is completely free. Unlimited unpersonalized dictation for everyone.
Open-source, native audio turn detection model2025 · github.com · ▲126Our goal with this project is to build a completely open source, state of the art turn detection model that can be used in any voice AI application. I've been experimenting with LLM voice conversations since GPT-4 was first released. (There's a previous front page Show HN about Pipecat, the open source voice AI orchestration framework I work on. [1]) It's been almost two years, and for most of that time, I've been expecting that someone would "solve" turn detection. We all built initial, pretty good 80/20 versions of turn detection on top of VAD (voice activity detection) models. And…
AI Voices by Asyncflow v1.02025 · async.com · ▲401Premium AI voice quality without the premium price tag.
More ai this month
the category →
Paintings by AI models: programs run through a simulation of oil paint.
AI · 22d ago · stillwet.art
FastRouter.ai▲364Route requests to the right LLM for cost, latency & quality
AI · 23d ago · fastrouter.ai
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, December 2025
the whole month →- GP
Life & fun · Dec 2025 · dosaygo-studio.github.io
Hi everyone! My name's Luke and I made the original Jmail here alongside Riley Walz. We had a ton of friends collaborate on building out more of the app suite last night in lieue of DOJ's "Epstein files" release. Please AMA!
Life & fun · Dec 2025 · jmail.world
PlanEat AI▲733AI turns your health goals into a 7-day menu & grocery list
AI · Dec 2025 · planeatai.com
Community, All the HN belong to you. This is an archive of hacker news that fits in your browser. When I made HN Made of Primes I realized I could probably do this offline sqlite/wasm thing with the whole GBs of archive. The whole dataset. So I tried it, and this is it. Have Hacker News on your device. Go to this repo (https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook): you can download it. Big Query -> ETL -> npx serve docs - that's it. 20 years of HN arguments and beauty, can be yours forever. So they'll never die. Ever. It's the unkillable static archive of HN and it's…
Dev tools · Dec 2025 · hackerbook.dosaygo.com
