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Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

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Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#171

Post by Zizizizz »

ArlenBales wrote: post #147
primaprashant wrote: post #47

Speech-to-text has become integral part of my dev flow especially for dictating detailed prompts to LLMs and coding agents. I have collected the best open-source voice typing tools categorized by platform in this awesome-style GitHub repo. Hope you all find this useful! https://github.com/primaprashant/awesome-voice-typing

Can you explain how exactly dictation is used for development? I type about 120 WPM so typing is always going to be way faster for me than talking. Aside for accessibility, is dictation development for slower typers or is it more so you can relax on a couch while vibe coding? If this comes off as condescension it's not intended, I am genuinely out of the loop here.

Most English speakers speak faster than 120 wpm so that's probably why people, especially those who can't type at speeds like you can, prefer it.

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#172

Post by pushedx »

arkensaw wrote: post #77

This is great, and I'm not knocking it, but every time I see these apps it reminds me of my phone. My 2021 Google Pixel 6, when offline, can transcribe speech to text, and also corrects things contextually. it can make a mistake, and as I continue to speak, it will go back and correct something earlier in the sentence. What tech does Google have shoved in there that predates Whisper and Qwen by five years? And why do…

It's the same model used for the WebSpeech API, which can operate entirely offline.

Google mostly funded the training of this model around 10 years ago, and it's quite good.

There are many websites that are simple frontends for this model which is built into Webkit and Blink based browsers. However to my knowledge the model is a blob packed into the apps which is not open source, hence the no Firefox support.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_...

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#174

Post by xyos »

sipjca wrote: post #154
perelin wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Slept on. Wish they would do an ios version, but the creator already kind of dismissed it.

I just don't have the bandwidth to run another project, maintaining Handy is hard enough on it's own, especially for free! I didn't just dismiss for no reason, I am a human! I have needs and I can't just sleeplessly stay in front of the computer putting out code. If I had more time I would, but alas. Someone could easily vibe code an iOS version in a few hours. I could do the same but I do not have time to support it…

Thank you for your work, I highly appreciate it!

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#175

Post by earthnail »

theturtletalks wrote: post #109
atlgator wrote: post #54

This thread is a support group for people who have each independently built the same macOS speech-to-text app.

I'm tracking them all here: https://opensource.builders/alternatives/superwhisper Just added Ghost Pepper, and you can actually create a skill.md with the features you need to build your own

Please add wordbird as well: https://github.com/tillahoffmann/wordbird

It has all the usual features, plus you can add project specific vocabulary in your repo. It detects the working folder based on the active window, reads a WORDBIRD.md file in that folder and corrects terms accordingly.

(My friend Till built it)

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#176

Post by zgougou123 »

theturtletalks wrote: post #109
atlgator wrote: post #54

This thread is a support group for people who have each independently built the same macOS speech-to-text app.

I'm tracking them all here: https://opensource.builders/alternatives/superwhisper Just added Ghost Pepper, and you can actually create a skill.md with the features you need to build your own

You could add foxsay, a great one : https://github.com/skulkworks/foxsay

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#177

Post by [deleted] »

theturtletalks wrote: post #109
atlgator wrote: post #54

This thread is a support group for people who have each independently built the same macOS speech-to-text app.

I'm tracking them all here: https://opensource.builders/alternatives/superwhisper Just added Ghost Pepper, and you can actually create a skill.md with the features you need to build your own

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#179

Post by k9294 »

miki123211 wrote: post #160

What do you actually use for STT, particularly if you prize performance over privacy and are comfortable using your own API keys? I was on WhisperFlow for a while until the trial ran out, and I'm really tempted to subscribe. I don't think I can go back to a local solution after that, the performance difference is insane.

Try ottex.ai - it has an OpenRouter like gateway with most STT models on the market (Gemini, OpenAI, Groq, Deepgram, Mistral, AssemblyAI, Soniox), so you can try them all and choose what works best for you.

My favorites are Gemini 3 Flash and Mistral Voxtral Transcribe 2. Gemini when I need special formatting and clean-up, and Voxtral when I need fast input (mostly when working with AI).

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#180

Post by [deleted] »

goodroot wrote: post #4

Nice one! For Linux folks, I developed https://github.com/goodroot/hyprwhspr . On Linux, there's access to the latest Cohere Transcribe model and it works very, very well. Requires a GPU though. Larger local models generally shouldn't require a subordinate model for clean up. Have you compared WhisperKit to faster-whisper or similar? You might be able to run turbov3 successfully and negate the need for cleanup. Incid…

[deleted]
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