Show HN: BetterWispr – Free, open-source dictation for Mac
betterwispr.com
betterwispr.com
I've been coding with Claude, and I pretty much do it exclusively by voice now, simply because it's so much faster. And I kind of feel like Scotty from Star Trek IV, when he holds up a Mac mouse to try to talk into it.
I've been using VoiceInk [1] which looks like it's basically the same as this, but has been around for longer.
What has really made it work for me is using a Bluetooth media control like [2], where I use Karabiner Elements to remap its play/pause button to the dictation keyboard shortcut. I map rewind to option-backspace to delete the last word, fast-forward to shift-enter to insert a newline, a lower button to enter to submit my prompt, and the volume up/down buttons to scroll up/down. I've also just ordered to Xiaomi Bluetooth remote [3] that includes a microphone itself to see if I can get it to work by speaking directly into it and using it as the microphone -- there are a couple of open source projects to turn it into a Mac microphone directly. Since I'd like to be able to talk more quietly instead of into my Mac.
But what I'm REALLY waiting for is the ability to use one button for dictation, and a second button for issuing commands for a local LLM to interpret. So I hold down the voice button which transcribes "I think we need to catch that" and then the second button and go "change catch to cache, like c-a-c-h-e". Or hold down the second button and go "switch to VS code". I don't want something as finicky as macOS Voice Control, I want a local LLM I can speak naturally to.
I can very much see a future where I spend the majority of my "work" time using a Apple TV-type remote.
[1] https://github.com/Beingpax/VoiceInk
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Satechi-Bluetooth-Multimedia-Remote-C...
[3] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Xiaomi-Bluetooth-Remote-2-Pro-...
Bonus points if you work in an office. This kind of workflow would be a nightmare.
…unless it means we get our private offices back.
I find speaking tiresome, somehow, and if I had to talk all the time to my computer with text input being a fidgety "accessibility" option, I'd retire to a monastery and just become a monk.
Agree with the need for different buttons for different voice contexts though.
Though I think it will become a dedicated AI key on some keyboards.. How about the Right Alt/Option on MacBooks? Does anybody use that? It could be the "AI Anywhere" input key, optionally defaulting to voice, and while F5 could continue to serve as a literal dictation key..
Imagine everyone on public transport speaking in to their phones to navigate and control them.
A microphone sensitive to subvocalization could maybe get around some of these problems, but it'd still be kind of weird.
I have not considered input for editing functions but that makes a lot of sense. Maybe a swipe gesture or something with a little capacitive pad on the ring.
Why don't you use an AI agent to code up an app for your phone that does this and more? If a phone is too heavy or bulky, what about an ESP32?
It sounds like a fun way to "code", but I just can't imagine how it works in reality.
And it does. I don't even have to write out my final thoughts neatly summarized myself. Claude figures it out on its own and saves me a bunch of time. It's much faster for me to read it's logically laid out conclusions and confirm that that is actually what I had meant. Never once have I seen it get it wrong, but quite frequently it raises additional points for me to consider or highlights potential inconsistencies in what I have said.
So the actual session itself with Claude includes a whole lot of rambling and brainstorming, but then the actual documented artifacts of the session are the nice clean summary of what we figured out. And then, for example, when we move from a brainstorming design phase into a coding implementation phase, I'll start a brand new session so that it's context isn't polluted by the brainstorming and rambling but is rather starting off with the nicely organized document that had been created as the artifact from the previous session.
And this is why dictation works so well as a feature. Because it means I frequently wind up essentially "oversharing" my product requirements with Claude, and it will frequently suggest potential solutions that I had overlooked because I was already assuming that the solution would take a particular form. So it becomes surprisingly collaborative rather than me just dumping requirements into Claude.
I can promise you it does, and it's amazing. I can stream-of-consciousness to the LLM, correcting and changing myself within the same paragraph of text and it works it out. Sometimes I clean up the text if I really went off into left-field but I just straight word-vomit into the text field and get amazing results. I don't waste my time editing, cleaning it up, etc, just speak and send. Dictation is gotten so good that I barely need to review/edit it. Even mistakes "committed" vs "commit it" and other mis-hearing are handling very well. Every once in a while the LLM needs to clarify but it's rare.
Less than 5 times out of thousands of prompts I've sent this way have failed due to bad dictation results and all but 1-2 of those were caught very quickly. In one, maybe two, cases it got pretty far along before I realized the mistake but I like those odds and nothing made it to PR (let alone a deployed environment) before it was caught. It was in reviewing the plan where I was like "what are you going on about?" and then scrolled up to see what it misheard from me which completely explained it's confusion and it going in the wrong direction. No problem, kill that session and restart with the right prompt.
As for "Fun", yeah, it's incredibly fun because I don't have to filter/edit upfront. It's how I talk to most LLMs, dump _as much_ context as I can verbally into it and let it sort it out. I, like pretty much everyone, can talk faster than I can type so I find myself giving MUCH more detailed prompts to agents as compared to if I had to type it all.
I checked out the alternatives mentioned in this thread and they appear more over-loaded, "sloppy" and commercial. Handy just does the thing without extras.
you can try the notetaking feature which i have build
It’s surprising in 2026 this is still the default “best” all rounder. Kudos to the early OpenAI team and the open community efforts / improved models since then.
betterwispr main goal is to have accuracy and best dx possible.
And if MacOS 26 does it right - all of this is no longer necessary for us to vibe fork/ code on weekends :-)
P.S. Handy looks slick. May be able to ditch mine
I got annoyed by various UI and other things in tools like VoiceInk, Handy etc and Claude-Coded my own CLI dictation tool called VoxType that uses parakeet-mlx:
https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/tools/voxtype...
Install this skill for your coding agent and let it help you set it up, there are many config options:
npx skills add pchalasani/claude-code-tools -s voxtype-install -g
uv tool install voxtype
So much better to just add my own features and slowly customize it to suit my needs.
I have a fun feature where I can retranscribe with multiple local models and then compare transcripts and optionally label/correct them to accumulate data on which models are most accurate over time.
this product is just 14mb binary.
I've not used either and I'm sure they're both great, but just saying an alternative is bad isn't particularly useful to anyone here.
the reason it is bad, it's a 150-200mb binary i remembered downloading, it was not accurate for my accent, was missing lot of words, i tried wisprflow and it was accurate, the dx was top notch and i was a annual plan subscriber, but i think they are cost cutting on inference and all of the features which i mentioned got severely degraded.
this was the main motivation to build betterwispr, again this is my personal opinion, i was just thinking out loud. really sorry that people get offended in general.
Are folks finding it lacking / needing alternatives?
One, in the post-transcription cleanup phase, instead of programmatically fixing the text, I just feed the text with a prompt + dictionary of words into an LLM. Initially tried doing this with the on-device model from Apple in macOS 27, but that was too slow. I've now been playing around with gpt-oss-20b on Groq, which appears to be fast and effective. Although I'm curious how well your programmatic approach works, I might try some sort of a bake off over the next few days. But in the long run, I think I might still stick with an LLM-based formatter because you can have far more interesting formatting considerations or formatting prompts based on the app that you are using or the style or tone of your dictated text.
Two - When building the dictionary of words to fix, I'm also including a recording of the word and having the transcription model just predict draft out variants to use as replacements.
Nice work, thanks for building it!
https://github.com/opennookorg/betterwispr
also do star it helps.
I thought the small model won't be any good, but it's actually great and barely causes the GPU any usage.
Like other people in this thread mentioned, I switched pretty much exclusively to working with voice. Whether it's responding to text or talking to Claude or writing an email.
- use case: record gaming videos in your voice and in real time get cloned voice back
- why? too much noise in surroundings
- whose gonna build this one?
The main thing I need is some way of auto-sending a "end of message" button (like a newline would do) at the end of the message so that it auto-sends the chat.
Not sure the exact right way to implement that, but it seems like something that could be general purpose. Maybe a setting per-active app?
But trying to implement it directly into ness hasn't worked that well. It seems like betterwispr/wisprflow/etc all seem to belong better as their own app, and we just need good integration points between the push-to-talk app and the text consuming apps (like the IDE)
I did one (it's free) and recent update brought it very close to Wispr on local models only: https://dictator.work
Nevertheless I dictate almost exclusively with Claude Code now, because it's such better ergonomics. And it's still significantly faster.
But a big benefit is that I'm never hunching, I'm never straining my wrists, none of that stuff. Dictation is just so much better for your neck and back.
I'll be curious to see how the existence / popularity of tools like this end up affecting the pricing of paid tools like Wispr Flow.
Playing with anything that just works. Also allow for cleaning existing text. (Written not by speech) In some way.
Congrats on shipping!
Want a remote terminal into my Mac that I can voice control.
it's just a 14 mb file so no bloat as well.
I don't do everything. Also fully expect Siri and AppIntents will continue to improve
having said that, what would you like to control?
I’m a dinosaur and still read the code that my ai has written and do a pass with my own eyes of other people PRs. Saying and landing precisely in things like “open this PR in VSCode”. Does it require many actions? No. Would it reduce friction? Hell yea. Doing all that while the ide (example, again) will suddenly decide to rebuild the indexes or run extension updates etc is breaking the flow. Being able to jump into fully loaded and prepared place that is ready to go - it would be very good.
I will admit. First it started with the need to use like 2 ides in everyday work (there was a time at Google when IDEA was defunded and eclipse was sole supported Java ide, but I hated eclipse wholeheartedly and used it only for debugging), and now with ai coding I really feel how my fluency with ides is degrading day after day. I remember myself even 5 years ago (and more so 10-15) - I, somehow, much more rely on mouse or things like “find action/command palette” than I did in past.
I wrote a blog about this[1] "Audio transcription is worse in 2026 than it was in 2016"
1 https://write.as/shantnu/audio-transcription-is-worse-in-202...
do star it on gh if you liked it!
I’m building BetterWispr, a free and open-source voice dictation app for macOS.
I wanted to make voice typing more accessible without requiring a monthly subscription or sending every recording to a cloud server.
You can hold Option + Space, speak naturally, and have the transcription inserted directly into whatever app you’re using.
A few things I’ve been working on:
- Local speech recognition using Whisper, Parakeet, or Apple Speech - Automatic cleanup of filler words and repeated phrases - Custom vocabulary for names and technical terms - Different writing styles depending on the app - Optional meeting transcription and summaries
The project is open source under Apache 2.0.
I’m still improving the experience, especially around transcription accuracy, speed, and reliability across different Macs.
I’d love feedback from people who regularly use voice dictation.
What would make you switch from your current dictation tool to an open-source alternative?
Website: https://betterwispr.com/
Mostly because I could use this only when I’m working from home, and even then after a few minutes I’ll get tired of speaking to myself and I actually type way faster than I speak.