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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

#121

Post by zhengyi13 »

Laurenz1337 wrote: post #100

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.

Some of us have hands (and wrists and arms) that are dealing with RSI. Keyboard use reduction is very important in these cases.

Greg Priest Dorman [0][1] had other physical issues such that he had to regularly switch between sitting, standing, and walking during his workday. His solutions included (in part) some very specialized keypads, but TTS might well have been another solution for someone with similar needs.

Another fellow on my team refuses to write/type anything other than pure code to solve issues at work, but will absolutely talk for hours on end about designs, considerations, issues, what-have-you, so we're actively trying to get him to adopt a TTS-based workflow for knowledge transfer, writing tickets/bugs, etc.

[0]: https://computerhistory.org/profile/greg-priest-dorman/ [1]: https://www.cs.vassar.edu/people/priestdo/wearables/top

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

#122

Post by paweladamczuk »

I also vibe coded my own version of this. Funny to see how many people did that.

https://github.com/PawelAdamczuk/blah

Mine was only tested on an Arc GPU (the acceleration works nicely through Vulkan). It hooks into Win32 API and simulates key presses so it works in various non-obvious contexts.

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

#123

Post by h3lp »

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…

FWIW whisper.cpp with the default model works at 6x realtime transcription speed on my four-core ~2.4GHz laptop, and doesn't really stress CPU or memory. This is for batch transcribing podcasts.

The downside is that couldn't get it to segment for different speakers. The concensus seemed to be to use a separate tool.

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

#124

Post by BizarroLand »

9999gold wrote: post #38
Fidelix wrote: post #6

MacOS only. May this help you skip a click.

Not sure why you got downvoted. I wish this was a tag or something.

People can't see up votes and down votes for other people on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36460246

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

#125

Post by BatteryMountain »

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…

I also built one.. mine is called whispy. I use mine to pump commands to claude. So far a bit hit & miss, still tweaking it.

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

#126

Post by BizarroLand »

baseh wrote: post #117
xnx wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the Android keyboard transcription not work for your needs?

For Android I find Google GBoard transcription most accurate and pretty solid.

Not wrong, but at the same time, some people use Android and also remove Google from the equation, so finding an alternative for Gboard is valuable to them. I'm one of them and I really like Futo.

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

#127

Post by BizarroLand »

zachlatta wrote: post #10
s0l wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/cjpais/Handy It’s free and offline

Wow, Handy looks really great and super polished. Demo at https://handy.computer/

[I'm using] Handy myself right now. And it's pretty good. I don't have any problems with it, except that I wish that it would slowly roll out the text as you talk instead of waiting to transcribe into the very end. because I like to rant and ramble a little bit and then go back and edit what I've written rather than having to perfectly compose on the first attempt. And that's one of the big advantages, in my opinion, of using a voice to text app is that it would let you ramble and rant and see what you have said and keep making additions and alterations to that. For instance, I'm doing this entire bit using handy in one stream of thought take. And so it's probably gonna be a bit rambly and not very polished, but at the same time it's more representative of a general use case. And I'm talking quite a bit so that I can actually put the system under stress and see how well it responds.

My only issue with it was that it cut off the words [I'm using] at the beginning and obviously it doesn't enter paragraph breaks. It took about 25 seconds to transcribe all of that on a 10th gen i7 laptop processor.

If they could incorporate combination typing out what was said while you're talking it would be pretty perfect.

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

#128

Post by BizarroLand »

baxtr wrote: post #25

Is there a tool that preserves the audio? I want both, the transcript and the audio.

Handy appears to keep the audio clips, It does have a section in the settings to limit how many of those it keeps and there does not appear to be an upper limit, but it does have to be manually set. (I set mine to 99,999).

It would be nice if below 0 it had a -1 option to keep all recordings.

https://handy.computer/

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

#129

Post by odiroot »

arach wrote: post #111
odiroot wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://github.com/goodroot/hyprwhspr have you tried this? I have a nice 64GB new linux machine waiting to be set up for me to kick the tires on this pretty sure it's awesome - sorry OP about mentioning another project, we're all learning here :)

Thanks, will take a look.

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

#130

Post by nitroedge »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #125
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…

I also built one.. mine is called whispy. I use mine to pump commands to claude. So far a bit hit & miss, still tweaking it.

Handy for me has worked wonders
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