alt.hn

2/13/2026 at 6:51:20 PM

Show HN: OpenWhisper – free, local, and private voice-to-text macOS app

 https://github.com/richardwu/openwhisper

by rwu1997

2/14/2026 at 2:32:25 AM

I really like https://handy.computer for this.

by stavros

2/14/2026 at 2:33:21 PM

I'm looking for something to transcribe .m4a recordings that I make for my genealogy efforts. Do you know of anything that can take a file as input?

by venusenvy47

2/14/2026 at 7:31:25 PM

Whisper.cpp will do it, and you can also use Parakeet v2, though I haven't tried running that one specifically.

by stavros

2/14/2026 at 3:03:15 PM

If you're familiar with CLI you could use ffmpeg to extract audio then pipe the audio into whatever transcriber

by purrcat259

2/14/2026 at 5:05:16 PM

I use ffmpeg a lot, but I'm curious if anyone can recommend a transcribe tool.

by venusenvy47

2/14/2026 at 5:10:58 AM

Another vote for handy. I am using with Parakeet and its pretty good.

Now its mostly about models getting better.

by whinvik

2/14/2026 at 12:39:25 PM

Thanks for the Handy info. (New to me)

Haven’t used Parakeet, but noting it too.

Commenting here so I come back to it.

by aanet

2/14/2026 at 5:31:03 AM

Requiring microphone access is a dealbreaker. I transcribe audio files I’ve recorded on other equipment. You don’t need my mic for that.

I clicked hoping it would leverage whisper’s translation capabilities as well, since MacWhisper does not do that (it leverages Apple’s subpar built in translation). It doesn’t do that either.

(Maybe you’re using this for dictation? That’s a very specific subset of transcription. I’d suggest using a name that leans into that.)

by eduction

2/14/2026 at 1:37:50 AM

I thought i had tried this but no it’s a massively crowded app name. I’ll check this out soon, but honestly this one has been great.

https://github.com/Starmel/OpenSuperWhisper

Though it seems like the dev stopped work on it

by zenapollo

2/14/2026 at 8:48:08 PM

Pretty nice to have menu bar integration. For macOS 26+, why not use the already-installed on-device speech transcription models?

by podlp

2/15/2026 at 6:05:07 PM

I didn’t realize this was a thing: will try it out :)

by rwu1997

2/14/2026 at 12:48:36 AM

how does it compare to wispr flow?

which beats the pants off android or iphone transcription...

by dcsan

2/13/2026 at 9:55:07 PM

the video on github is not working

by umtksa