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Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue

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Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue

#61

Post by sipjca »

zachlatta wrote: post #17
digitalbase wrote: post #14

Was searching for this this morning and settled on https://handy.computer/

I just learned about Handy in this thread and it looks great! I think the biggest difference between FreeFlow and Handy is that FreeFlow implements what Monologue calls "deep context", where it post-processes the raw transcription with context from your currently open window. This fixes misspelled names if you're replying to an email / makes sure technical terms are spelled right / etc. The original hope for FreeFlow…

There's an open PR in the repo which will be merged which adds this support. Post processing is an optional feature if you want to use it, and when using it, end to end latency can still be under 3 seconds easily

Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue

#62

Post by Brajeshwar »

muratsu wrote: post #33

For those using something like this daily, what key combinations do you use to record and cancel. I’m using my capslock right now but was curious about others

Can you please teach me how to use the CAPS LOCK key as a push-to-talk?

Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue

#63

Post by zachlatta »

sipjca wrote: post #61
zachlatta wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just learned about Handy in this thread and it looks great! I think the biggest difference between FreeFlow and Handy is that FreeFlow implements what Monologue calls "deep context", where it post-processes the raw transcription with context from your currently open window. This fixes misspelled names if you're replying to an email / makes sure technical terms are spelled right / etc. The original hope for FreeFlow…

There's an open PR in the repo which will be merged which adds this support. Post processing is an optional feature if you want to use it, and when using it, end to end latency can still be under 3 seconds easily

That’s awesome! The specific thing that was causing the long latency was the image LLM call to describe the current context. I’m not sure if you’ve tested Handy’s post-processing with images or if there’s a technique to get image calls to be faster locally.

Thank you for making Handy! It looks amazing and I wish I found it before making FreeFlow.

Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue

#64

Post by shostack »

threekindwords wrote: post #52

i've used macwhisper (paid), superwhisper (paid), and handy (free) but now prefer hex (free): https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex for me it strikes the balance of good, fast, and cheap for everyday transcription. macwhisper is overkill, superwhisper too clever, and handy too buggy. hex fits just right for me (so far)

Tried to use it, installed, enabled permissions, downloaded the parakeet model for English and then it crashed every time I released the button after dictating. Completely unusable.

Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue

#65

Post by gurjeet »

digitalbase wrote: post #14

Was searching for this this morning and settled on https://handy.computer/

Thanks for the recommendation! I picked the smallest model (Moonshine Base @ 58MB), and it works great for transcribing English.

Surprisingly, it produced a better output (at least I liked its version) than the recommended but heavy model (Parakeet V3 @ 478 MB).

Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue

#69

Post by lxe »

I built something similar for Linux (yapyap — push-to-talk with whisper.cpp). The "local is too slow" argument doesn't hold up anymore if you have any GPU at all. whisper large-v3-turbo with CUDA on an RTX card transcribes a full paragraph in under a second. Even on CPU, parakeet is near-instant for short utterances.The "deep context" feature is clever, but screenshotting and sending to a cloud LLM feels like massive overkill for fixing name spelling. The accessibility API approach someone mentioned upthread is the right call — grab the focused field's content, nearby labels, window title. That's a tiny text prompt a 3B local model handles in milliseconds. No screenshots, no cloud, no latency.The real question with Groq-dependent tools: what happens when the free tier goes away? We've seen this movie before. Building on local models is slower today but doesn't have a rug-pull failure mode.

Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue

#70

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

vesterde wrote: post #24

Since many are asking about apps with simillar capabilities I’m very happy with MacWhisper. Has Parakeet, near instant transcription of my lengthy monologues. All local. Edit: Ah but Parakeet I think isn’t available for free. But very worthwhile single purchase app nonetheless!

I actually got MacWhisper originally for speech to text so I could talk to my machine like a crazy person. I realized I didn't like doing that but the actual killer feature for buying it that I really enjoy is the fully local transcription of meetings, with a nice little button to start recording that pops up when you launch zoom, teams, etc. It means I can safely record meetings and encrypt them locally and keep internal notes without handing off all of that to some nebulous cloud platform.

I had previously used Hyprnote to record meetings in this way - and indeed I still use that as a backup, it's a great free option - but the meeting prompting to record and better transcription offered by Macwhisper is a much better experience.

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