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

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101–110 of 139 posts

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

#101

I 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.

you shouldn't use autism as a generic insult as you have here

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

#102

Was 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 [1] https://github.com/PinW/whisper-key-local

the astroturfing here off topic of op post is unbearable

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

#104
post #43

I just vibe coded a my own NaturalReader replacement. The subscription was $110/year... and I just canceled it. Chatterbox TTS (from Resemble AI) does the voice generation, WhisperX gives word-level timestamps so you can click any word to jump, and FastAPI ties it all together with SSE streaming so audio starts playing before the whole thing is done generating. There's a ~5s buffer up front while the first chunk gene…

do you have a github?

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

#105
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.

No. Give it a try I think you’ll be surprised

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

#106
The moat here is local inference. Whisper.cpp + Metal gives you <500ms latency on M1 with the small model. no API costs + no privacy concerns. Ship that and you've got something the paid tools can't match. The UI is already solid, the edge is in going fully offline.

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

#107
Just Text to speech seems like its largely solved on pretty much every compute platform. However I have found a huge gap going from independent words being transcribed, to formatted text ready for an editor, or further processing.

If you look at how authors dictate they works ( which they have done for millennia), just getting the words written down is only the first step, and its by far the easiest. I have been helping build a tool https://bookscribe.ai that not only does the transcription, but then can post process it to make it actually usable for longer form content.

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

#108

Just Text to speech seems like its largely solved on pretty much every compute platform. However I have found a huge gap going from independent words being transcribed, to formatted text ready for an editor, or further processing. If you look at how authors dictate they works ( which they have done for millennia), just getting the words written down is only the first step, and its by far the easiest. I have been help…

Aqua Voice does (at least some of) that as well.

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

#109

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

Not sure if it's just me but Handy crashes on my Arch setup. Never mind which version I run. Could be something with Wayland or Pipewire but didn't see anything obvious in the logs.

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

#110

To build your own STT (speech-to-text) with a local model and and modify it, just ask Claude code to build it for you with this workflow. F12 -> sox for recording -> temp.wav -> faster-whisper -> pbcopy -> notify-send to know what’s happening https://github.com/sathish316/soupawhisper I found a Linux version with a similar workflow and forked it to build the Mac version. It look less than 15 mins to ask Claude to mod…

Yeah, it's really that simple. I have tried various applications as well and keep coming back to my custom script because when a new voice model drops on HuggingFace it becomes possible to customize it immediately - rather than wait for that application developer to support that new model.
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