Wordbird: free dictation for Mac running Nvidia Parakeet locally
Dear HN, Wordbird is an open-source voice dictation app for macOS, powered by Nvidia Parakeet running locally on Apple Silicon via MLX. You can teach it project-specific terms like brand names or frameworks using a project-level WORDBIRD.md file. Run it via `uvx wordbird`. Press a hotkey, speak, and your words are transcribed and pasted into whatever app is focused. A small LLM, also running locally, post-processes the transcription to fix errors. If you use apps like VS Code, Zed, Terminal.app or iTerm, Wordbird will know which directory you're in, look up a project-specific WORDBIRD.md…
Wordbird: free dictation for Mac running Nvidia Parakeet locally launched on March 25, 2026 with 5 votes, #1,928 of 23,380 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
Open source transcription using NVIDIA Parakeet and postprocessing with Qwen. - tillahoffmann/wordbird
Contextual voice dictation for macOS. Powered by NVIDIA Parakeet running locally on Apple Silicon via MLX . Press a hotkey, speak, and your words are transcribed and pasted into whatever app is focused. A small LLM post-processes the transcription to fix errors, using project-specific context from a WORDBIRD.md file. # Run with uvx (no install needed) uvx wordbird # Or run in the background uvx wordbird start uvx wordbird stop uvx wordbird status Context-aware correction You can improve transcription with a WORDBIRD.md file which lists project-specific terms that may be misheard. Either create a standard template, or ask Claude to analyze your project and create the file for you. ---…from github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Dear HN, Wordbird is an open-source voice dictation app for macOS, powered by Nvidia Parakeet running locally on Apple Silicon via MLX. You can teach it project-specific terms like brand names or frameworks using a project-level WORDBIRD.md file. Run it via `uvx wordbird`. Press a hotkey, speak, and your words are…
Does a similar job
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DictatoFeb 2026 · dicta.to · ▲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…
SaylineJan 2026 · sayline.app · ▲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…
TongueType for macOSMay 2026 · tonguetype.app · ▲109Hi HN, I'm a longtime web dev, but this is my first macOS app. Feedback is very welcome <3 I built TongueType because every dictation app I tried failed at least one of three things: it sent my audio to someone's cloud, it charged me monthly fee, or it felt clunky or enterprisy. The cloud thing kills it for anything sensitive. The subscription thing is insulting for what amounts to "Whisper + a hotkey." TongueType runs Whisper locally on Apple Silicon via CoreML. It's built to feel like a second keyboard: tap the hotkey, talk, let go, words appear. It sits in the menu bar (no dock icon, no…
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