Huge fan! Parakeet v3 works great with it. I have used Monologue, Superwhisper, and Aqua, at various times in the past. But Handy is at least as good, and it's not an expensive subscription. I love that it runs locally, too. Strongly recommend!
Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app
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Re: Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app
#92I’ve tried several, including this one, and I’ve settled on VoiceInk (local, one-time payment), and with Parakeet V3 it’s stunningly fast (near-instant) and accurate enough to talk to LLMs/code-agents, in the sense that the slight drop in accuracy relative to Whisper Turbo3 is immaterial since they can “read between the lines” anyway. My regular cycle is to talk informally to the CLI agent and ask it to “say back to…
I wish one of these models was fine tuned for programming. I want to be able to say things like "cd ~/projects" or "git push --force".
I'll bet you could take a relatively tiny model and get it to translate the transcribed "git force push" or "git push dash dash force" into "git push --force".
Likewise "cd home slash projects" into "cd ~/projects".
Maybe with some fine tuning, maybe without.
Re: Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app
#93Quick thoughts re: mentioned transcribers
Superwhisper — Been using it a long time. It's paid with a lifetime subscription available. Tons of features. Language models are built right in without additional charge. Solo dev is epic; may defer upgrades to avoid occasional bugs/regressions (hey, it's complex software).
Trying each for a few minutes:
Hex — Feels the leanest (& cleanest) free options mentioned for Mac in this thread.
Fluid Voice — Offers a unique feature, a real-time view of your speech as you talk! Superwhisper has this, but only with an online model. (You can't see your entire transcript in Fluid, though. The recording window view is limited to about one sentence at a time--of course you do see everything when you complete your dictation.)
Handy — Pink and cute. I like the history window. As far as clipboard handling goes, I might note that the "don't modify clipboard" setting is more of a "restore clipboard" setting. Though it doesn't need as many permissions as Hex because it's willing to move clipboard items around a bit, if I'm not mistaken.
Note Hex seems to be upset about me installing all the others... lots of restarting in between installs all around. Each has something to offer.
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Big shout out to Nvidia open-sourcing Parakeet--all of these apps are lightning fast.
Also I'm partial to being able to stream transcriptions to the cursor into any field, or at least view live like Fluid (or superwhisper online). I know it's complex b/c models transcribe the whole file for accuracy. (I'm OK with seeing a lower quality transcript realtime and waiting a second for the higher-quality version to paste at the end.)
Re: Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app
#94As a Mac user, am I missing something? macOS has Dictation built-in, when you short press F5 it should start transcribing your spoken words into text in real time. It even does non-English languages.
Besides being trash as others said, there’s a trade off with real time transcription word by word - there’s no opportunity for an AI to holistically correct/clean up the transcription
But, OSX does come back and fix things.
Re: Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides being trash as others said, there’s a trade off with real time transcription word by word - there’s no opportunity for an AI to holistically correct/clean up the transcription
But, OSX does come back and fix things.
You mean, after displaying each word as it is spoken, then OSX goes back and fixes what’s been displayed? I think I’ve seen it fix one or two recent words, but I guess you’re saying it could fix the entire sentence as well. I didn’t know that
Re: Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app
#96Is there any good android app featuring parakeet v3?
Re: Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app
#97Is there any good android app featuring parakeet v3?
Went into a rabbit hole and found this: https://github.com/notune/android_transcribe_app
Solid app that uses Parakeet V3.
With these random apps on the internet I am always a bit sceptical. Checked it with adb and it is really fully local. I now have a voice keyboard that is a lot better than Google's and has local multilanguage support. I am stoked :)
Re: Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app
#98Is there any good android app featuring parakeet v3?
Went into a rabbit hole and found this: https://github.com/notune/android_transcribe_app Solid app that uses Parakeet V3. With these random apps on the internet I am always a bit sceptical. Checked it with adb and it is really fully local. I now have a voice keyboard that is a lot better than Google's and has local multilanguage support. I am stoked :)
Now I can continue coding via tmux/Claude Code with the https://github.com/rberg27/doom-coding setup while going for a walk in nature.
Re: Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Handy can post process with LLMs too! It’s just currently hidden behind a debug menu as an alpha feature (ctrl/cmd+shift+d)
I was just thinking about building something like this, looks like you beat me to the punch, I will have to try it out. I'm curious if you're able to give commands just as well as some wording you want cleaned up. I could see a model being confused between editting the command input into text to be inserted and responding to the command. Sorry if that's unclear, might be better if I just try it.
I’d just try it and fork handy if it doesn’t work how you want :)
Re: Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
What microphone are you using?
Airpods Max (is that the name?) - the big ones.
Yeah like the other commenters mentioned, using Bluetooth devices does not work super well at the moment. Hopefully I’ll have a fix at some point. There’s just some time over bluetooth to negotiate the connection and everything, and the app doesn’t do a good job showing this at all right now
On a Mac I definitely recommend using the internal mic even if wearing airpods