Zen Whisper
On-device Mac dictation that types into any app
Zen Whisper launched on August 2, 2026 with 136 votes, #236 of 23,274 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
What it does
Hold a shortcut and dictate into any Mac app without sending audio to the cloud. Zen Whisper keeps core speech recognition on-device, with local models, searchable transcripts, voice memos, media transcription, and Pro tools for larger models and translation.
Speech to text and dictation for Apple Silicon Macs, running on device. A free 14-day trial, then 3,000 words a week free. 110 spoken language options.
Private dictation that runs on your Mac and puts text where your cursor already is. No window to copy out of. The whole interaction is one key. Text lands in Mail, Slack, Notes, your editor, wherever you already were. Right Command, Option, or Control. Ordinary typing is never interrupted. Speak naturally. Punctuation and capitals are handled for you. The text appears at your cursor. Nothing to copy, nothing to paste. Most dictation tools force mixed speech into one language and mangle it. Zen Whisper ships Hinglish as its own option, and returns Roman script rather than Devanagari. Said out loud, typed straight into the app you were already in. Pick a language or let it detect one. Text…from zenproducts.ai
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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…
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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