top | item 47006248

Show HN: OpenWhisper – free, local, and private voice-to-text macOS app

37 points| rwu1997 | 17 days ago |github.com

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 time

Claude Code w/ Opus 4.6: - Fewest turns to get main functionality right (recording, hotkeys, permissions) - Was able to get a decent UI with a few more turns

Codex App w/ Codex 5.3 Extra-High: - Worst one-shot UI - None of the functionality worked without multiple subsequent prompts

15 comments

stavros|17 days ago

I really like https://handy.computer for this.

venusenvy47|16 days ago

I'm looking for something to transcribe .m4a recordings that I make for my genealogy efforts. Do you know of anything that can take a file as input?

whinvik|16 days ago

Another vote for handy. I am using with Parakeet and its pretty good.

Now its mostly about models getting better.

kristianp|16 days ago

MacWhisper has been around for a while and it says no data leaves your machine.

https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

eduction|16 days ago

Requiring microphone access is a dealbreaker. I transcribe audio files I’ve recorded on other equipment. You don’t need my mic for that.

I clicked hoping it would leverage whisper’s translation capabilities as well, since MacWhisper does not do that (it leverages Apple’s subpar built in translation). It doesn’t do that either.

(Maybe you’re using this for dictation? That’s a very specific subset of transcription. I’d suggest using a name that leans into that.)

zenapollo|17 days ago

I thought i had tried this but no it’s a massively crowded app name. I’ll check this out soon, but honestly this one has been great.

https://github.com/Starmel/OpenSuperWhisper

Though it seems like the dev stopped work on it

PhilippGille|16 days ago

That's a very similar name as https://github.com/OpenWhispr/openwhispr

Which is a voice to text app as well.

podlp|16 days ago

Pretty nice to have menu bar integration. For macOS 26+, why not use the already-installed on-device speech transcription models?

rwu1997|15 days ago

I didn’t realize this was a thing: will try it out :)