5 ms·

Show HN: Dictator – Hammerspoon-Based macOS Dictation (Whisper API, FLAC, SoX)

2 points by glossardi 9mo ago

glossardi 9mo ago
Hey HN, I built Dictator because I wanted a lightweight, highly controllable voice-to-text tool for macOS that uses my own OpenAI API key instead of a monthly subscription service. It’s a Lua-based extension for Hammerspoon. How it works: Hold Fn (or a custom hotkey) to record. Release to transcribe. The text is auto-pasted into your active application (or copied to clipboard). Technical details & optimizations: Audio Pipeline: Uses SoX to record directly to FLAC (16kHz mono). This reduces upload size by ~50% compared to WAV, which significantly speeds up the Whisper API response time. Reliability: Implements a token bucket rate limiter to prevent API abuse and exponential backoff for handling 429/5xx errors gracefully. Debouncing: I added strict debouncing logic to ignore accidental short taps (<0.4s) and prevent double-triggers. Security: Your API key is stored locally and sent directly to OpenAI; there is no intermediate server. Repo: https://github.com/Glossardi/Dictator-Speech-to-Text https://github.com/Glossardi/Dictator-Speech-to-Text I’d love to hear your thoughts on the push-to-talk UX versus a toggle approach, and if anyone has ideas on further reducing latency!
vee-kay 9mo ago
This is cool. MS Windows (Win10 or Win11) has this dictate-speech-to-text feature built-in, but its accurate isn't up to the mark. Win11 users can use Win+H hotkeys for dictation: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-voice-typing-to-talk-instead-of-type-on-your-pc-fec94565-c4bd-329d-e59a-af033fa5689f https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-voice-typing... MS Copilot (obviously) understands dictation a lot better, but that speech recognition using Copilot is not (and should not be) available in every text box or editor on Windows.
- glossardi 9mo ago
  Mac has it as well, but it's very slow and has poor accuracy.

5 ms·

Show HN: Dictator – Hammerspoon-Based macOS Dictation (Whisper API, FLAC, SoX)

2 points by glossardi 9mo ago

glossardi 9mo ago
Hey HN, I built Dictator because I wanted a lightweight, highly controllable voice-to-text tool for macOS that uses my own OpenAI API key instead of a monthly subscription service. It’s a Lua-based extension for Hammerspoon. How it works: Hold Fn (or a custom hotkey) to record. Release to transcribe. The text is auto-pasted into your active application (or copied to clipboard). Technical details & optimizations: Audio Pipeline: Uses SoX to record directly to FLAC (16kHz mono). This reduces upload size by ~50% compared to WAV, which significantly speeds up the Whisper API response time. Reliability: Implements a token bucket rate limiter to prevent API abuse and exponential backoff for handling 429/5xx errors gracefully. Debouncing: I added strict debouncing logic to ignore accidental short taps (<0.4s) and prevent double-triggers. Security: Your API key is stored locally and sent directly to OpenAI; there is no intermediate server. Repo: https://github.com/Glossardi/Dictator-Speech-to-Text https://github.com/Glossardi/Dictator-Speech-to-Text I’d love to hear your thoughts on the push-to-talk UX versus a toggle approach, and if anyone has ideas on further reducing latency!
vee-kay 9mo ago
This is cool. MS Windows (Win10 or Win11) has this dictate-speech-to-text feature built-in, but its accurate isn't up to the mark. Win11 users can use Win+H hotkeys for dictation: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-voice-typing-to-talk-instead-of-type-on-your-pc-fec94565-c4bd-329d-e59a-af033fa5689f https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-voice-typing... MS Copilot (obviously) understands dictation a lot better, but that speech recognition using Copilot is not (and should not be) available in every text box or editor on Windows.
- glossardi 9mo ago
  Mac has it as well, but it's very slow and has poor accuracy.