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

Post by arach » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 6:47 AM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #80

lxe wrote: post #69

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…

> The "local is too slow" argument doesn't hold up anymore if you have any GPU at all. By "any GPU" you mean a physical, dedicated GPU card, right? That's not a small requirement, especially on Macs.

Post by arach » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 7:20 AM UTC

Barbing wrote: post #77

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big fan of handy and it’s cross platform as well. Parakeet V3 gives the best experience with very fast and accurate-enough transcriptions when talking to AIs that can read between the lines. It does have stuttering issues though. My primary use of these is when talking to coding agents. But a few weeks ago someone on HN pointed me to Hex, which also supports Parakeet-V3 , and incredibly enough, is even faster than Ha…

I installed a few different STT apps at the same time that used Parakeet and I think they disagreed with each other. But Hex otherwise would’ve won for me I think. Wanna reformat the Mac & try again (been a while anyway). My comment on this from a month back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637040

Post by properbrew » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 7:56 AM UTC

Zopieux wrote: post #53

Saved you a click: Mac only and actually Grok; local inference too slow. Won't be free when xAI starts charging.

Post by dan_wood » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 8:08 AM UTC

Post by ghrl » Tue, Feb 17, 2026, 8:41 AM UTC

arach wrote: post #81

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "local is too slow" argument doesn't hold up anymore if you have any GPU at all. By "any GPU" you mean a physical, dedicated GPU card, right? That's not a small requirement, especially on Macs.

My M1 16GB Mini and M2 16GB Air both deliver insane local transcription performance without eating up much memory - I think the M line + Parakeet delivers insane local performance and you get privacy for free