This earned an upvote for the fantastic readme / installation guide alone. Very well done.
Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
131–140 of 159 posts
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#132How does this compare to VoiceInk which is also open-source and been there much longer and supports all the features that you have? https://github.com/Beingpax/VoiceInk
VoiceInk (one time payment) and WisprFlow (subscription) are currently my fav dictation apps. I just looked at Whispering and have to say VoiceInk is far superior to Whispering in terms of Ux, and clarity of settings, so I think VoiceInk deserves at least as much attention. There are several things that make a huge difference things that make a huge difference in dictation apps, besides the obvious speed and accuracy:
- allow flexible recording toggle shortcuts - show a visual icon with waves etc showing recording - how the clipboard is handled during recording (does it copy to clipboard? does it clear it after text output?)
VoiceInk is nearly there in terms of good behavior on these dimensions, and I hope to ditch my Wispr Flow sub soon.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#133Among all the offline transcription apps I've tried, my favorite remains https://whispernotes.app. High accuracy, one-time purchase, and genuinely offline. I love its clean UI.
Honestly, I'm getting tired of subscription-based apps. If it's truly offline, shouldn't it support a one-time purchase model? The whole point of local-first is that you're not dependent on ongoing cloud services, so why structure pricing like you are?
That said, will definitely give Whispering a try - always happy to see more open source alternatives in this space, especially with the local whisper.cpp integration that just landed.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#134If anyone's interested in a janky-but-works-great dictation setup on Linux, here's mine: On key press , start recording microphone to /tmp/dictate.mp3: # Save up to 10 mins. Minimize buffering. Save pid ffmpeg -f pulse -i default -ar 16000 -ac 1 -t 600 -y -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 -flush_packets 1 -avioflags direct -loglevel quiet /tmp/dictate.mp3 & echo $! > /tmp/dictate.pid On key release , stop recording, transcribe…
before i even bother opening that github: does it work on windows? so far, all of the whisper "clones" run poorly, if at all, on windows. I do have a 3060 and a 1070ti i could use just for whisper on linux, but i have this 3090 on my windows desktop that works "fine" for whisper, TTS, SD, LLM.
Whisper on windows, the openai-whisper, doesn't have these q8_0 models, it has like 8 models, and i always get an error about triton cores (something about timeptamping i guess), which windows doesn't have. I've transcribed >1000 hours of audio with this setup, so i'm used to the workflow.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#135Among all the offline transcription apps I've tried, my favorite remains https://whispernotes.app . High accuracy, one-time purchase, and genuinely offline. I love its clean UI. Honestly, I'm getting tired of subscription-based apps. If it's truly offline, shouldn't it support a one-time purchase model? The whole point of local-first is that you're not dependent on ongoing cloud services, so why structure pricing lik…
Thanks for shouting out some other great alternatives! The UI looks really clean.
Right now, the pricing is entirely free, and we are trying to expand our local model support to make it truly free. Subscriptions are up to the user right now.
Thanks for giving us a shot, and no pressure on using it! At the end of the day, I just want to build something that is open source and trustworthy, and hopefully will fit into the Epicenter ecosystem, the data layer that I talked about earlier in my post.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#136If anyone's interested in a janky-but-works-great dictation setup on Linux, here's mine: On key press , start recording microphone to /tmp/dictate.mp3: # Save up to 10 mins. Minimize buffering. Save pid ffmpeg -f pulse -i default -ar 16000 -ac 1 -t 600 -y -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 -flush_packets 1 -avioflags direct -loglevel quiet /tmp/dictate.mp3 & echo $! > /tmp/dictate.pid On key release , stop recording, transcribe…
Thanks for sharing a great alternative! It seems that that setup can go a long way for Linux users.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#137If anyone's interested in a janky-but-works-great dictation setup on Linux, here's mine: On key press , start recording microphone to /tmp/dictate.mp3: # Save up to 10 mins. Minimize buffering. Save pid ffmpeg -f pulse -i default -ar 16000 -ac 1 -t 600 -y -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 -flush_packets 1 -avioflags direct -loglevel quiet /tmp/dictate.mp3 & echo $! > /tmp/dictate.pid On key release , stop recording, transcribe…
This is my favorite kind of software, to write and to use. I am reminded of Upton Sinclair's evergreen quote:
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!
in the special case where the thing to be understood is "your app doesn't need to be a Big Fucking Deal". Maybe it pleases some users to wrap this in layers of additional abstraction and chrome and clicky buttons and storefronts, but in the end the functionality is already there with a couple of FOSS projects glued together in a bash script.
I used to think the likes of Suckless were brutalist zealots, but more and more I think they (and the Unix patriarchs) were right and the path to enlightenment is expressed in plain text.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#138Looks like a really cool project. Do you have any opinions on which transcription models are the best, from a quality perspective? I have heard a lot of mixed opinions on this. Curious what you've found in your development process?
I'm a huge fan of using Whisper hosted on Groq since the transcription is near instantaneous. ElevenLabs' Scribe model is also particularly great with accuracy, and I use it for high-quality transcriptions or manually upload files to their API to get diarization and timestamps ( https://elevenlabs.io/app/speech-to-text ). That being said, I'm not the biggest expert on models. In my day-to-day workflow, I usually swap…
Nice. Yeah, we are dogfooding some systems I built in my household. We use whisper.cpp and I haven't had any issues. I get told frequently I should be using eleven labs but I just have been too lazy to build a benchmark that would help me decide
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#139I've been interested in dictation for a while, but I don't want to be sending any audio to a remote API, it all has to be local. Having tried just a couple of models (namely the one used by the FUTO Keyboard), I'm kinda feeling like we're not quite there yet. My biggest gripe perhaps is not being able to get decent content out of a thought stream; the models can't properly filter out the pauses, "uuuuhmms", and much…
Have you tried Whisper itself? It's open-weights. One of the features of the project posted above is "transformations" that you can run on transcripts. They feed the text into an LLM to clean it up. If you're willing to pay for the tokens, I think you could not only remove filler-words, but could probably even get the semantically-aware editing (corrections) you're talking about.
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Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#140If anyone's interested in a janky-but-works-great dictation setup on Linux, here's mine: On key press , start recording microphone to /tmp/dictate.mp3: # Save up to 10 mins. Minimize buffering. Save pid ffmpeg -f pulse -i default -ar 16000 -ac 1 -t 600 -y -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 -flush_packets 1 -avioflags direct -loglevel quiet /tmp/dictate.mp3 & echo $! > /tmp/dictate.pid On key release , stop recording, transcribe…
before i even bother opening that github: does it work on windows? so far, all of the whisper "clones" run poorly, if at all, on windows. I do have a 3060 and a 1070ti i could use just for whisper on linux, but i have this 3090 on my windows desktop that works "fine" for whisper, TTS, SD, LLM. Whisper on windows, the openai-whisper, doesn't have these q8_0 models, it has like 8 models, and i always get an error about…
If you want to stay near the bleeding edge with this stuff, you probably want to be on some kind of linux (or lacking that, Mac). Windows is where stuff just trickles down to eventually.