Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#21

Post by goodroot » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:06 PM UTC

LuxBennu wrote: post #12

goodroot wrote: post #4

Nice one! For Linux folks, I developed https://github.com/goodroot/hyprwhspr . On Linux, there's access to the latest Cohere Transcribe model and it works very, very well. Requires a GPU though. Larger local models generally shouldn't require a subordinate model for clean up. Have you compared WhisperKit to faster-whisper or similar? You might be able to run turbov3 successfully and negate the need for cleanup. Incid…

I've been running whisper large-v3 on an m2 max through a self-hosted endpoint and honestly the accuracy is good enough that i stopped bothering with cleanup models. The bigger annoyance for me was latency on longer chunks, like anything over 30 seconds starts feeling sluggish even with metal acceleration. Haven't tried whisperkit specifically but curious how it handles longer audio compared to the full model.

Ah yeah, longform is interesting.

Not sure how you're running it, via whichever "app thing", but...

On resource limited machines: "Continuous recording" mode outputs when silence is detected via a configurable threshold.

This outputs as you speak in more reasonable chunks; in aggregate "the same output" just chunked efficiently.

Maybe you can try hackin' that up?

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#22

Post by MattHart88 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

aristech wrote: post #16

Great job. How about the supported languages? System languages gets recognised?

Thanks! We currently have 2 multi-lingual options available: - Whisper small (multilingual) (~466 MB, supports many languages) - Parakeet v3 (25 languages) (~1.4 GB, supports 25 languages via FluidAudio)

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#23

Post by zackify » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

yeutterg wrote: post #6

ipsum2 wrote: post #3

Parakeet is significantly more accurate and faster than Whisper if it supports your language.

Are you running Parakeet with VoiceInk[0]? [0]: https://github.com/beingpax/VoiceInk

i am, working great for a long time now

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#24

Post by stavros » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:08 PM UTC

konaraddi wrote: post #5

That’s awesome! Do you know how it compares to Handy? Handy is open source and local only too. It’s been around a while and what I’ve been using. https://github.com/cjpais/handy

Handy is fantastic.

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#25

Post by zackify » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

parhamn wrote: post #19

I see a lot of whisper stuff out there. Are these the same old OpenAI whispers or have they been updated heavily? I've been using parakeet v3 which is fantastic (and tiny). Confused why we're still seeing whisper out there, there's been a lot of development.

same, even have kokoro for speech back to text for home assistant and parakeet on mac os through voice ink.

Also vibe coded a way to use parakeet from the same parakeet piper server on my grapheneos phone https://zach.codes/p/vibe-coding-a-wispr-clone-in-20-minutes

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#26

Post by gegtik » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC

how does this compare to macos built in siri TTS, in quality and in privacy?

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#27

Post by Supercompressor » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

I've been looking for the opposite - wanting to dump text and it be read to me, coherently. Anyone have good recommendations?

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#28

Post by ttul » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:17 PM UTC

guzik wrote: post #18

Sadly the app doesn't work. There is no popup asking for microphone permission. EDIT: I see there is an open issue for that on github

And many people are mailing in Codex and Claude Code generated PRs - myself included. Fingers crossed, I suppose.

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#29

Post by ericmcer » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:17 PM UTC

I see quite a few of these, the killer feature to me will be one that fine tunes the model based on your own voice.

E.G. if your name is `Donold` (pronounced like Donald) there is not a transcription model in existence that will transcribe your name correctly. That means forget inputting your name or email ever, it will never output it correctly.

Combine that with any subtleties of speech you have, or industry jargon you frequently use and you will have a much more useful tool.

We have a ton of options for "predict the most common word that matches this audio data" but I haven't found any "predict MY most common word" setups.

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#30

Post by jiehong » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:18 PM UTC

goodroot wrote: post #10

hephaes7us wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing! I was literally getting ready to build, essentially, this. Now it looks like I don't have to! Have you ever considered using a foot-pedal for PTT? Apple incidentally already has native STT, but for some reason they just don't use a decent model yet.

They do, and they even have that nice microphone F5 key for it, and an ideal OS level API making the input experience >perfect Apparently they do have a better model, they just haven't exposed it in their own OS yet! https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech/bringing-ad... Wonder what's the hold up... For footpedal: Yes, conceptually it’s just another evdev-trigger source, assuming the pedal exposes usable key…

The only issue with Apple models is that they do not detect languages automatically, nor switch if you do between sentences.

Parakeet does both just fine.