nowfound

AI · August 21, 2023

SA

superwhisper – AI powered offline voice to text for macOS

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…

In plain words

Superwhisper is an offline voice-to-text application for macOS that addresses limitations in native dictation. Built on whisper.cpp technology, it offers accurate transcription with automatic punctuation, works across all applications, and supports multiple languages. The app runs efficiently on Apple Silicon chips, with base and standard models available for free and larger models requiring payment. It works entirely offline and provides configurable settings for different user needs.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

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…

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • superwhisper2023 · ▲274

    Extremely accurate, AI powered voice-to-text for macOS

  • superwhisper for iOS2024 · ▲330

    Extremely accurate, AI powered voice-to-text

  • OF
    OpenWhisper – free, local, and private voice-to-text macOS appFeb 2026 · github.com · ▲37

    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…

  • MacWhisper2023 · ▲123

    High quality text transcription with OpenAI's whisper on Mac

  • FA
  • GoWhisper2023 · ▲150

    Cross-platform, privacy-first audio transcription app

More ai this month

the category →
  • I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.

    AI · 19d ago · simedw.com

  • Astute585

    Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators

    AI · 20d ago · company-app.joinastute.com

  • Grok Bot547

    AI teammates that you can give real work to

    AI · 27d ago · x.ai

  • Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…

    AI · 28d ago · cactuscompute.com

  • Monid479

    One wallet, every paid tool your agent needs

    AI · 8d ago · monid.ai

  • Turn website visitors into qualified pipeline

    AI · 21d ago · clarasdr.ai

Source: Show HN post · launch text quoted in part

Launched alongside, August 2023

the whole month →
  • Resend1,326

    Email for developers

    Dev tools · 2023 · resend.com

  • STORI AI1,320

    Your ideas become visually compelling branded social posts

    AI · 2023 · storiai.com

  • Kombai1,080

    A new AI model that you can prompt with UI designs

    AI · 2023 · kombai.com

  • Understand your audience without 50 interviews

    AI · 2023 · founderpal.ai

  • Lottielab871

    Create and ship lottie animations to sites and apps faster

    Dev tools · 2023 · lottielab.com

  • LC

    Outlines is a Python library that focuses on text generation with large language models. Brandon and I are not LLM experts and started the project a few months ago because we wanted to understand better how the generation process works. Our original background is probabilistic, relational and symbolic programming. Recently we came up with a fast way to generate text that matches a regex (https://blog.normalcomputing.ai/posts/2023-07-27-regex-guide...). The basic idea is simple: regular expressions have an equivalent Deterministic-Finite Automaton (DFA) representation. We…

    AI · 2023 · github.com