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Show HN: Looped Whisper (FOSS) – Voice transcription menubar app for macOS
I built a free, open-source (MIT) macOS menu-bar app that runs Whisper models locally to assist with dictation. There is also the option to use an LLM (BYOK).
You hold a global hotkey, speak, and the text gets pasted at your cursor similar to other similar/popular apps.
Some details:
- Transcription runs locally via WhisperKit (CoreML), so it works offline once the model is downloaded. BYO model — tiny through large-v3, auto-downloaded and cached. The base model has been working surprisingly well for me with gpt-5.4-mini as the transformation model.
- Push-to-talk (hold) and start/stop toggle hotkeys, both configurable.
- fn/Globe key supported.
- Realtime mode for live captions as you speak.
- Optional LLM cleanup to fix typos/punctuation — point it at Anthropic or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, key stored in the macOS Keychain.
- A vocabulary feature to bias recognition toward your names, jargon, and identifiers (handy for dictating code).
- This works as a menu-bar agent, no Dock icon, optional launch at login.
I built this because I wanted local dictation that I could fully own and that handled dev jargon, without a subscription.
Superwhisper/Wispr Flow is a more polished and full-featured - this is just a hackable, open source version.
- ipotapov 3mo agoYour use of Whisper models on-device for macOS aligns well with the goals of speech-swift (which I maintain), offering robust integration with CoreML for ASR and TTS. It could serve as an alternative with its native Swift async support on Apple Silicon. Explore more here: https://github.com/soniqo/speech-swift https://github.com/soniqo/speech-swift
- RatulMaharaj 3mo agoI just had a look at some of your youtube videos. It looks awesome, I will definitely take a look at using it. I've been thinking about how I can support other local models in the future - I think this would make a lot of sense for the ASR in my app. Do you have any realtime ASR examples of speech-swift that I could look at?
- ipotapov 3mo agoFor english Parakeet streaming is good model, and also new model Nemotron ASR Streaming. Reach me on linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-sur/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-sur/ if you need any help.
- RatulMaharaj 2mo agoAwesome thanks, I sent you a request on linkedin.