alt.hn

7/27/2026 at 6:36:02 PM

Show HN: Yap – OSS on-device voice dictation for macOS with no model to download

 https://github.com/FrigadeHQ/yap

by pancomplex

7/28/2026 at 3:21:21 AM

I don't think get it unless I'm missing something - how is this different from just using the built in Mac OS dictation feature?

At first I thought it was going to be a CLI/package to interface with that API which sounded interesting, but I already use a hotkey to dictate text on my Mac via the OS.

by heresalexandria

7/28/2026 at 3:42:37 AM

I don't think you're missing something - Apple's built in dictation is pretty good. The biggest issue is that it still executes parts of it online via Apple's servers and even has a disclosure that it "sends information like your voice input, contacts, and location to Apple."

This project uses the on-device SpeechAnalyzer API directly and makes zero network calls, and since it's open source you can verify that nothing leaves your Mac. It also keeps a local searchable history. Finally, I also added press-to-stop with a preview so you can cancel a bad take before it inserts, instead of typing live (very useful in terminal).

What type of package were you hoping it was?

by pancomplex

7/28/2026 at 4:23:58 AM

Ahh that makes sense, I was under the impression that OS dictation used exclusively on device models for dictation now but you're right - they do still send this data for transcription.

That definitely changes my take and I'm interested in trying this!

My initial assumption was that this was something I could invoke via CLI or within scripts to transcribe audio from files or user input using on-device models, which is something I would presently probably use Whisper for.

by heresalexandria

7/28/2026 at 5:00:13 AM

Does the new SpeechAnalyzer API not call Apple Servers? I remember when I was building on the last version, it you wanted real time transcription you needed at least to upload it to Apple Servers for processing.

by HaloZero

7/28/2026 at 6:06:11 AM

I think it once did! Now it doesn't - ways to easily verify this:

1) install the dmg in the GH repo

2) turn off wifi

3) use it offline

by pancomplex

7/28/2026 at 11:25:19 AM

That doesn’t prove it doesn’t send data if it has the possibility. It could use the offline model only as a fallback.

by echoangle

7/29/2026 at 4:51:41 AM

yeah, this is a possibility and also they could store it and send it after we appear online.

by ganeshmshetty

7/28/2026 at 7:14:08 AM

I was having the same question, now it makes sense.

by earthpyy

7/28/2026 at 8:28:41 AM

Incidentally, I've been testing a lot of dictation apps and models. I am on macOS Sequoia and intend to skip Tahoe altogether, so newer Apple models were not an option. I also dictate in multiple languages.

I mostly use the MacWhisper app until now, but I got frustrated by its slow development and lack of focus and dictation. So I tried the free TypeWhisper app. It works very well, but then I tested multiple models and my conclusion was that one cannot beat the Whisper Large v3 model for accuracy. I tried Qwen ASR (very good, but only for English), Voxtral (spoke Polish to it and it wrote Russian, BIG oopsie), Parakeet TDT 3 (very fast, but sometimes inaccurate).

I got frustrated by the speed of the Whisper Large model. So I spent an hour with AI benchmarking, testing and developing a new plugin. Turns out that on a modern Mac with a good GPU you can run the Whisper Large model at roughly the same speed as the tiny Parakeet model. 2-3x faster than what other apps ship. It's just that nobody bothered.

So, I am now happily dictating into TypeWhisper and then feeding the dictated text into a local gemma-4-26b-a4b-qat LLM for corrections. Everything happens instantly.

by jwr

7/28/2026 at 4:43:52 PM

Thank you for testing TypeWhisper and the different models so thoroughly, and for sharing the results. Comparing several engines across multiple languages is already valuable; going one step further and building a faster Whisper Large v3 plugin is a real contribution.

This is exactly why I made TypeWhisper’s engine and plugin layer extensible. The best setup depends heavily on language, hardware, and workload. Your result that Large v3 can run close to Parakeet speeds on a modern Mac is especially interesting, as is your fully local Whisper plus Gemma correction workflow.

If you’re comfortable sharing the plugin or benchmark setup, I’d be very interested in taking a closer look and seeing whether it could benefit more users. Either way, thank you for putting so much time into this and contributing your findings back to the project.

by SeoFood

7/28/2026 at 6:24:42 AM

Amazing! This is something I wanted to look into too.

The Apple Foundation models SDKs are surprisingly cool. I recently started working on a personal productivity app that tries to keep track of all the projects I work on, and the ideas and initiatives within these. It does so by creating a graph of events, fed by Claude transcripts and the git and browser history, then letting FM summarize and describe all events; that in turn feeds a semantic search index in an SQLite database.

What I have now is an app that shows me where all my projects stand, what I last worked on, where I left forks behind (like deciding for one idea and doing something else "later"), and how to get back into something I wasn’t working on for a while. It also has a built-in MCP server, so I can ask Claude code about any past event or decision or roughly-similar keyword, and it’ll get sensible answers back!

Called the thing Pensieve :-)

However, one thing still missing is actually being able to ask it directly, or talk to it, so Yap looks like a great opportunity to learn!

by 9dev

7/28/2026 at 12:16:17 PM

Sounds really interesting, is it open-source by any chance?

by theturtletalks

7/28/2026 at 10:16:21 AM

Does the built-in dictation not use these models or why would I use this app instead of Apple's own dictation?

by Ducki

7/28/2026 at 2:33:27 PM

Apple's built in dictation still executes parts of it online and even has a disclosure that it "sends information like your voice input, contacts, and location to Apple."

This project uses the on-device SpeechAnalyzer API directly and makes zero network calls, and since it's open source you can verify that nothing leaves your Mac.

by pancomplex

7/29/2026 at 5:04:17 AM

That's a nice app. I don't know how it differs from the normal mac dictation — cuz normal thing works great, but I think having a visual cue of what's happening like yap does is a nice thing. And can we replace the actual microphone key for the activation of the voice?? Also for the concern of the mac dictation sending it to the cloud — also could mean that the speech api could also send it to the cloud right?

by ganeshmshetty

7/28/2026 at 8:11:01 AM

Great, just experimenting to see which is better voice apps to use for my Claude Code cli, on my Mac. for now settled with /voice command. will try Yap. It will be good to have an option to add custom voice commands, let say I want to open an app, or go to folder, that can be plugged, apart from transcription. Not sure if that is deviation, for Yap, love to have that kind of feature.

by prabhanjana_c

7/28/2026 at 8:19:43 AM

It works, on my Mac book pro. Thanks!

by prabhanjana_c

7/29/2026 at 2:11:53 AM

This does the same thing with Apple models or Ollama models. Also has meeting transcription: https://voice.baselinemakes.com

by stevenhubertron

7/28/2026 at 9:08:49 AM

Strangely, on my macOS 27 Beta build 26A5388g, nothing happens after I finish speaking. No input is transcribed or pasted and nothing is shown in the history.

I do see the input being listed to — there's an audio graph animated as I speak (~US English), though it appears to be late in picking up my speech. Only my second "test?" is represented in the graph as it moves leftwards.

I went through all the permissions, they show as checked.

I also had a crash once, I've submitted the crash report.

Using the DMG from GitHub.

by jorisw

7/28/2026 at 2:35:28 PM

Sorry about these issues - appreciate all the details. Are you on an Intel Mac by any chance?

by pancomplex

7/28/2026 at 5:31:42 PM

Nope MacBook Air M4

by jorisw

7/28/2026 at 8:42:35 AM

Couple of suggestions/remarks:

- Remove the presence of the Dock icon. Yap is the kind of app you just want as a menu bar utility. Like Whisper.

- Add a "Settings..." menu item to the main Yap menu with `Command-,` as a shortcut. This will align it with other apps.

- I couldn't enter F13 as a shortcut.

- I saw there's a transcript history of input. I kind of don't want that to be there. I believe input should be ephemeral and not logged.

by jorisw

7/28/2026 at 8:51:33 AM

Thank you for this feedback! Heard from other folks the menu bar is redundant too - will kill it in the next update and fix the F13 issue.

And interesting re: history - it does have the option to clear, but you’d want that as a setting?

Trying to keep the amount of settings to a minimum - personally finding it overwhelming when apps have too many bells and whistles lol

by pancomplex

7/28/2026 at 9:10:18 AM

Honestly I'd ditch the Dock icon and keep the menubar item. For a utility with no other UI to use, that's the way to go, and similar apps do the same.

W.r.t. the history — I'm just saying I don't want my input to be logged at all. It has no utility. It can be discarded as soon as it's pasted. I don't want to maintain a log by pressing Clear every now and then.

by jorisw

7/28/2026 at 9:07:07 AM

Seems nice! I have been using Handy https://handy.computer/ for a while and I am happy with it (using Parakeet), this seems quite similar in terms of features, except that is uses Apple's APIs.

by d3k

7/28/2026 at 1:57:45 PM

Big fan of Handy as well. I often mix languages (german/english) and Apple onboard dictation is not working well in these cases. Having the ability to switch models so far has proven to be helpful. I guess Handy should implement the new native Apple APIs though.

by perelin

7/28/2026 at 5:13:15 AM

I thought I was familiar with this project but I think it’s unrelated to this one I remembered from last year? Same name and also more or less an app layer for the new speech to text APIs introduced in OS 26.

https://github.com/finnvoor/yap

by hbn

7/28/2026 at 6:07:27 AM

It's a great name. Glad someone else thought of something similar!

by pancomplex

7/28/2026 at 3:19:28 AM

This is super cool! The brew install path in the readme doesn't seem to work

remote: Repository not found. fatal: repository 'https://github.com/frigadehq/homebrew-tap/' not found

by __erik

7/28/2026 at 3:29:23 AM

My bad - this is now fixed. Thank you!

by pancomplex

7/29/2026 at 11:49:54 AM

This is great! Love how simple it is

by BurpyDave

7/28/2026 at 6:38:24 PM

built a small voice notes thing for myself last week and the surprise was that transcription accuracy wasn't the hard part. it's that i almost never want the raw transcript, i want the cleaned up version of it. keeping that out of scope is probably the right call for a dictation tool though.

by outoftheweed

7/28/2026 at 6:46:41 PM

I'm considering adding a feature to include auto punctuation and capitalization. Would that solve it for you?

by pancomplex

7/28/2026 at 3:24:35 AM

link to the benchmark against parakeet TDT v2 (the one im using now with spokenly) : https://get-inscribe.com/blog/parakeet-moss-apple-speech-ben...

NVIDIA Parakeet TDT v2 still best, but look like apple is not far behind.

i'd be happy to switch to yours if you add parakeet support, but that ight defy the purpose of the repo

by eric_khun

7/28/2026 at 3:38:12 AM

Thanks for linking! I've used both Apple's and Parakeet locally for a while and haven't been able to spot the difference in quality and speed is better on Apple's model (+ doesn't take several gigs of memory). Have you noticed any quality differences anecdotally?

by pancomplex

7/28/2026 at 6:45:42 AM

On-device speech recognition on macOS is such a game changer for privacy and speed. Excited to test this out!

by echoscarrie

7/28/2026 at 7:23:10 AM

Totally! I honestly think so many frontier AI models will be running locally in the future. This is just the start.

by pancomplex

7/28/2026 at 3:49:10 PM

Great, hope to see the language picker soon!

by xjlin0

7/28/2026 at 1:26:13 PM

I have wrote one too. Maybe this is the future.

by solos

7/28/2026 at 10:09:15 PM

So cool

by eadesola

7/29/2026 at 3:03:01 AM

[dead]

by viccater

7/28/2026 at 7:48:01 AM

[flagged]

by wayknow

7/28/2026 at 8:27:59 AM

[dead]

by umang_01

7/28/2026 at 12:50:53 PM

[flagged]

by receptopalak