Show HN: Sayso, free open source dictation for Mac, Windows, and Linux | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Sayso, free open source dictation for Mac, Windows, and Linux

github.com

25 pointswatzon11 comments

Nice!

Yet, with so many dictation apps, it makes me wonder how many are honeypots or something.

That's fair lol. Part of the reason I made this FOSS so it's easy to audit.

Having recently tried Handy (on Wayland/Gnome) it seemed very slow. On first look this seems very slick and the default settings are responsive on my aging laptop.

I'm very impressed so far.

any ideas for iOS? also can you a comparison vs https://github.com/opennookorg/betterwispr? thanks.

You app is phenomenal. I say this coming from Handy on Linux. Thanks!

How is this any different from any other open source dictation apps?

There's a few things: 1. This is significantly more efficient than most other apps. It was built using Rust and GPUI, so the app itself runs in ~5MB of memory. Most other apps are built using Electron or Tauri which results in a lot more memory and CPU usage. 2. This uses different backends for different systems, with the macOS backend being built on top of WhisperKit. This further adds to the efficiency. 3. AI enhancement is supported (but not required) using APIs, but also your local Claude Code or Codex CLI. That means for a large percentage of people AI enhancement requires basically no setup. 4. I am obviously highly biased, but I think this both looks and feels better than any other open source solution I've tried. This is of course going to be up to personal preference.

There's other things I could mention, but those are the big ones in my mind. I'm building this to take on WisprFlow, so the whole goal is to do what they do, but better and FOSS.

I've switched almost entirely to voice dictation on my phone using a local model, and I really want to do something similar on my desktop. I've been using Handy on Linux, but it's quite slow, even though I have a GPU available. I'll give Sayso a spin, thanks for sharing! I'll report back with any interesting findings.

Please do! I look forward to fixing any issues you find

Just to follow up here:

    * Downloaded the AppImage version for Linux (x64) from GH Releases
    * Downloaded the default Parakeet model
    * Tested with my BT headphones, worked perfectly, selected the correct device, no fiddling at all (Handy was much more difficult in this regard)
    * Actual dictation is pretty spectacular - live transcription as I speak Just Works, and it's returning 45-60 seconds of audio in <1s.  I think you've gotten the hardware detection right on Linux where Handy was struggling.

In any case, Sayso is my new default dictation app, and better than anything I've tried. Thanks for developing and sharing...excellent work!

EDIT:

    * Text insertion works seamlessly, not sure what you did there. Other tools struggled with Emacs and on the command line -- Sayso just seems to work.

I'll keep testing.

Nice. I will give it a try too. Thanks!

Handy worked fine for me on Windows, but on Fedora, I can't get it to work at all.

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