But SuperWhisper is free with Parakeet as a local model?
That’s how I have it running too
Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue
91–100 of 139 posts
Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue
#92Does any of these solutions work reliably for non-English languages? I’ve had a lot of issues trying to transcribe Swedish with all the products I’ve used so far.
Parakeet doesn't work ? https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3
If you are willing to use a service for transcriptions, Mistral (which is also European) works rather nicely if they support your language https://docs.mistral.ai/capabilities/audio_transcription#tra...
Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue
#93I 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…
Yeah local works really fine. I tried this other tool: https://github.com/KoljaB/RealtimeVoiceChat which allows you to live chat with a (local) LLM. With local whisper and local LLM (8b llama in my case) it works phenomenally and it responds so quickly that it feels like it's interrupting me.
Too bad that tool no longer seems to be developed. Looking for something similar. But it's really nice to see what's possible with local models.
Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue
#94I 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…
I've installed murmure on my 2013 Mac, and it works through 1073 words/minute. I don't know about you, but that's plenty faster than me :D
Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue
#95Murmure is multiplatform, uses parakeet and can connect to your local llm (using ollama). https://murmure.al1x-ai.com/
Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue
#96Was searching for this this morning and settled on https://handy.computer/
I didn't try Handy but been using Whisper-Key its super simple get out of your way all local single file executable (portable so zero install too) -- thats for Windows idk about the Mac version
Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue
#97I'm building in the same space, Workin on https://ottex.ai - It's a free STT app, with local models and BYOK support (OpenRouter, Groq, Mistral, and more).
The top feature is the per-app custom settings - you can peak different models and instructions for different apps and websites.
- I use the Parakeet fast model when working with Claude Code (VS Code app). - And I use a smart one when I draft notes in Obsidian. I have a prompt to clean up my rambling and format the result with proper Markdown, very convenient.
One more cool thing is that it allows me to use LLMs with audio input modalities directly (not as text post-processing). e.g. It sends the audio to Gemini and prompts it to transcribe, format, etc., in one run. I find it a bit slow to work with CC, but it is the absolute best model in terms of accuracy, understanding, and formatting. It is the only model I trust to understand what I meant and produce the correct result, even when I use multiple languages, tech terms, etc.
Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue
#98Was 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…
You can try ottex for this use case - it has both context capture (app screenshots), native LLMs support, meaning it can send audio AND screenshot directly to gemini 3 flash to produce the bespoke result.
Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue
#99Does any of these solutions work reliably for non-English languages? I’ve had a lot of issues trying to transcribe Swedish with all the products I’ve used so far.
Try ottex with Gemini 3 flash as a transcription model. I'm bilingual as well and frequently switch between languages - Gemini handles this perfectly and even the case when I speak two languages in one transcription.
Re: Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue
#100I dont understand who this is for honestly. Unless you dont have hands, why would you want to talk to your computer. Maybe Im just autistic, but I would always prefer text over speaking out and have that translate to text.