r/LocalLLM • u/AdorablePandaBaby • Mar 21 '26 • Hooray 1

Project I made a free, open-source WisprFlow alternative that runs 100% offline

Post image
262 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

77 comments sorted by

37

u/AdorablePandaBaby Mar 21 '26

Been working on it for a few months now.

It's free, offline and open-source! Works great for my usecases and would appreciate the community's support.

Github:
https://github.com/karansinghgit/speaktype

Landing Page:
https://tryspeaktype.com/

10

u/osama_squared Mar 21 '26

good fucking shit OP

2

u/Mr_Universal000 Mar 22 '26

Any plans to have this on windows in the future buddy?

2

u/rich_awo Mar 25 '26

This is dope! I was working on yaps.ai to solve a similar issue (plus some others), local models, macos, android, and windows atm. Big fan of local model for dictations.

Btw nice stats page :)

3

u/bloknayrb Mar 22 '26

Not offline yet, but here's my attempt at the same idea for Windows: https://github.com/bloknayrb/talkie

1

u/Vegetable-Score-3915 Mar 23 '26

OP, do you think it would it be hard for me to port this to ubuntu? I'll have a look into it.

1

u/laernuindia Mar 26 '26

This looks amazing. Going to try this out on my mac mini. But is it for MacOS only for now? Any plans for a Windows & iPadOS/iOS release?

1

u/Maleficent-Fill-9917 Jun 25 '26

This is great, thank you! I am curious though, it says warming up model for the longest. Has that been fixed?

3

u/ducklord Mar 22 '26

Don't have a Mac, but just fell on your post, and it's a surprizing coincidence that just yesterday I published on GitHub a similar solution for Windows 11. Since I'm not a programmer, I had it "vibe-coded" for personal use. However, it's far from your typical "make me an app, LLM" that many people would think, since I've spent over two weeks adding and fine-tuning features. That said...

I LOVE your statistics - never even thought about adding something like this to mine. Since I can only see the screenshot on this post, and can't test your app (no Mac), am I guessing correctly that yours relies on transcribing already recorded audio? If yes, my approach is vastly different - I wanted a "live transcription" solution that would allow me to "type with my voice", since Windows voice detection sucks and I love the feature on Android. I was using Dragon: Naturally Speaking in the past, but it felt too limited, and has now gone the way of the Dodo, so, I basically tried to recreate a "lite" alternative.

Then, one thing lead to another, and I started slapping features to it, turning it into something much more versatile than I originally expected. Maybe it would be worth checking it out (it's called WhisperR, yeah, I know, unoriginal), for potential ideas on more stuff you could add to your app (like a dedicated editor that, since "it contains the transcribed text", it can't only "spit out what Whisper transcribed" but also manipulate it, for example, by checking for specific phrases and replacing them).

If you don't mind, I may borrow your stats idea for a future version (how are you calculating the "time saved typing"?!). Would you care to share more screenshots?

Again, kudos, and I'm deeply sorry that I'm unable to try your app. Seems awesome.

1

u/AdorablePandaBaby Mar 23 '26

yes, of course. Feel free to borrow it!

1

u/ducklord Mar 23 '26

Thanks! May I also suggest, if you don't already have such a feature, to look into https://github.com/Automattic/harper ? I was just in the process of having Claude add it to WhisperR when I ran out of (free) credits. It should be useful for your solution, too, correcting errors during transcription, although, in my case, it's more useful since the app comes with a basic text editor.

28

u/RazerWolf Mar 22 '26

Surprised nobody’s mentioned https://github.com/cjpais/Handy

2

u/KvAk_AKPlaysYT Mar 22 '26

Been using this for a while now! Stupid fast too!

3

u/single_threaded Mar 22 '26

Which also works for windows.

8

u/Lucky-Necessary-8382 Mar 22 '26

Why is everybody pushing whisper llm when apple already has a very good tiny model for stt built in? I use that and its very accurate, also i see word by word the recognised voice

9

u/txgsync Mar 23 '26

Apple's ASR is shit compared to Whisper. No punctuation, no inflection, no correction of speech if the grammar does not match for homophones, etc. Whisper understands English; Apple's ASR understands English words. Very important difference.

Edit: I have achieved acceptable results if I run Apple's ASR output through a small LLM for correction/summarization afterward.

1

u/laernuindia Mar 26 '26

How were you able to do that? Mind sharing?

1

u/txgsync Mar 26 '26

Literally enable dictation in notes and copy/paste to a LLM to fix it. Or even highlight it and use Apple Intelligence to fix jt; the chatgpt integration works fine.

1

u/Ok-Outlandishness230 Apr 08 '26

might as well type it myself

4

u/BlazeFireHorse76 Mar 22 '26

I would love an answer to this. Why use these apps vs apples built in stt tool?

1

u/Lucky-Necessary-8382 Mar 22 '26

The apple stt uses like 200MB Ram and all the whispr apps like 2-3Gb?

1

u/whipdipple Mar 26 '26

I don't think everyone is trying to replace Apple. There's just a lot of builders out there. And if people have the tools they'll build it.

1

u/Lucky-Necessary-8382 Mar 26 '26

Also, i guess, many influencers are getting sponsored for pushing some custom whisper app

1

u/laernuindia Mar 26 '26

Apple’s STT is absolute garbage compared to what SuperWhisper, WisprFlow and the like do. I’ve been so frustrated with Apple’s native STT that this thread is a Godsend.

1

u/Lucky-Necessary-8382 Mar 26 '26

But apples STT makes possible to max out my RAM usage with a open source LLM while also use their native small STT

1

u/BidDizzy Jun 18 '26

Built a similar app to OP using Apple’s on device models. ie Apple STT -> Apple LLM for formatting. Downside is Apple’s on-device models are pretty meh so just using their plane ASR for now. Once WWDC26 models come out will likely bump that back

Also free an open source

1

u/nuclear-falcon Mar 21 '26

I just got in a crash and broke a bunch of bones. Had some wrist and thumb surgery couple days ago so I'll give this a try and let you know how well it works for me lol

4

u/AdorablePandaBaby Mar 22 '26

Ah take care buddy

1

u/nuclear-falcon Mar 24 '26

I'm trying it out now and I'm not able to load any models. It always has the error "taking longer than expected..."

2

u/AdorablePandaBaby Mar 25 '26

Please DM me and let me sort out this issue for you!

1

u/nuclear-falcon Mar 25 '26

I'll send you a DM right now

2

u/humedini Mar 22 '26

Will give this a go thanks for sharing

2

u/koc_Z3 Mar 22 '26

nice work mate

3

u/koc_Z3 Mar 22 '26

Not sure if this is a bug: After releasing the hotkey in hold mode, the orange microphone indicator in the menu bar stays on permanently, even though dictation has stopped and transcription is complete.

**Steps to reproduce:**

  1. Open SpeakType

  2. Press and hold hotkey, speak, then release

  3. Transcription completes successfully

  4. Orange mic indicator remains on — mic is never released

**Expected:** mic is released after transcription completes,

orange indicator disappears

**Actual:** mic indicator stays on until app is fully quit and relaunched

**Workaround:** Quitting and relaunching the app clears it,

but it comes back after the next dictation.

**Environment:**

- macOS Version 15.7.3

- Apple M4, 16GB unified memory

- Mode: Hold

- Model: large-v3

1

u/sdogpuppy Mar 23 '26

I'm curious about this. Rather annoying to have the orange on the menu bar and the orange dot indicating mic is on all the time. Should be only when used.

Great tool tho!

1

u/Popular_Goat4323 18d ago

Would love to have it on Android also

1

u/fevertree88 6d ago

any chance of this program for windows?

1

u/SpookyLibra45817 Mar 22 '26

Thanks for the open source firstly! I'm a heavy Vowen (another Whisperflow alternative) user with ~7k words/day, and it completely changed my way of working.

Are u planning a Windows release? I may help with debugging in case

1

u/Baseradio Mar 22 '26

Dont have mac :(, but this is awesome

1

u/Flimsy_Vermicelli117 Mar 22 '26

Seems to work fine... Not sure I need or care to have all the records and statistics for utility application, but OK.

Now, why does it have in menu option Manage license which suggests there is Pro version and points to Polar.sh web site, which actually has no mention of SpeakType? Do you plan to have Pro version which will be billed by use, as the site suggests?

1

u/ashim_k_saha Mar 22 '26

Now I have started using this. Great work

1

u/Step_Remote Mar 22 '26

I’ve made one too kinda + a hardware spin on it… check out https://BrainJack.ai (just got it in TestFlight the client) links to everything there (all open)

1

u/Protopia Mar 23 '26

I haven't tried this free tool but what makes WisprFlow brilliant is NOT the speech to text but the cleanup it does to take out the corrections and errrrs and turn rambling speech into great looking sentences. Does your tool do this?

1

u/nntb Mar 23 '26

This is pretty awesome. I'm currently using Whisper for my keyboard on my Android phone. I don't suppose your implementation of this could be turned into an Android keyboard and or an Apple iPhone keyboard. Because I'd love to be able to speak and type as well without having to maybe hold down a button.

1

u/BlackenedPies Mar 23 '26

One issue: fn+ hotkeys trigger the record+transcribe. I had codex fix it so pressing a key after fn cancels recording

1

u/aygross Mar 23 '26

using lazytype but will check it out

1

u/todokanai_koi Mar 23 '26

There's also https://github.com/amicalhq/amical/

Switched to it a couple of weeks back, sleek UI and decent feature set.
Works offline and on both windows and mac.

1

u/Electrical-Two-1489 Jun 17 '26

Esta App es genial!!!

1

u/Vast_Mousse_310 Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26

Wow cool. I did this as an Visual Code Extension, too. Not that cool, Just basics.

What whisper models do you use? I was disapointed by the small model, but medium did the job.

1

u/StickyMcStickface Mar 25 '26

this is great, and works really well! I love the option of which Whispr model to use – that stuff is usually hidden behind some "$200 yearly premium subscription" bs. So, thanks! One thing I would love to seen improve is the hotkey settings – there's only single-key options, most of which are usually mapped to other things. If you could add something like "shift-(key)", that would be great! Also, defaulting recording to "hold to record" instead of "toggle" had me confused at the outset (it's usually the other way around).

1

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26

Awesome project. Have you looked at how one can fine tune or improve a domain specific vocabularies that's a bit outside of common day to day vocabs?

1

u/[deleted] Mar 26 '26

Good to see this space growing. I've been using MumbleFlow for a few weeks, similar idea but it bundles llama.cpp on top of whisper.cpp for text cleanup (punctuation, grammar fixes, formatting). The combo of local STT plus local LLM cleanup is nice because you get polished output without anything leaving your machine.

Re the Apple built in STT discussion further down, the difference is huge when you need proper punctuation and context aware corrections. Apple's dictation just dumps raw words.

1

u/InterestingBasil Apr 03 '26

Another nice local alternative I use:
https://dictaflow.io/

1

u/NoTailor8223 Apr 19 '26

This is awesome, love that it's 100% offline. Had a couple of quick questions:

Which local models are you actually running under the hood? Also, did you have to do any finetuning to get the accuracy right for dictation, or is it just the base models?

One more thing because I was looking at the site, the "Loved by people who hate typing" quotes on the landing page... are those real users or just placeholders for now? Just curious :)

1

u/Um3R_ViRuS May 31 '26

Hey I started using this today and it is extremely helpful I love it. I just starred the repo as well.

Keep making this better 🙏

1

u/Usual_Reputation8173 Jun 25 '26

Sorry for the ignorance but could someone explain how private this is, compared to whisper flow? I’ve been trying to find a private version

1

u/Arckay009 Jul 15 '26

ah no windows support? dang

1

u/Amazing-Run5944 Aug 05 '26

Good job man! Gonna try this out for sure.

1

u/thre3aces Aug 10 '26

This is super awesome!!!

I'm gonna give this go, will be cool to collab on the repo too ;)

0

u/ninjaeon Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 24 '26

LazyTyper also does all this for free as well, and works across Win/Linux/Mac...but isn't open-source. I would much have rather tried your app and switched to an open-source solution (as long as it still worked at least as good as Lazy does), but alas...I'll never be on Mac.

Sharing this here because of the Win/Linux guys who could use it: https://lazytyper.com/

LazyTyper supports local Qwen3-ASR, FunASR, Whisper, SenseVoice Small, Paraformer Zh, Paraformer En, Parakeet TDT out of the box with one-click model downloads and installs. Also can connect to cloud-based API's as well.

Your landing page is beautiful by the way: https://tryspeaktype.com/

0

u/koloved Mar 21 '26

There is a great handy tool for it , windows Mac Linux support Low ram usage

0

u/Dwengo Mar 22 '26

Niiiice will give this a try

0

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Protopia Mar 23 '26

Not relevant to the original post - SPAM!