Open-source voice dictation apps
Desktop apps that listen while you hold a key, turn what you said into text, and paste it where your cursor is. Every one here can run the speech model on your own machine, so the audio never leaves it.
A free, offline push-to-talk dictation app for macOS, Windows and Linux that runs Whisper or NVIDIA Parakeet on your own machine and pastes the text at your cursor, under MIT.
A GPL-3.0 macOS dictation app that runs Nemotron, Parakeet, Cohere Transcribe, Apple Speech or Whisper on the device, with command and write modes, per-app prompts, and an optional closed local enhancement model.
A dictation and meeting-notes app under MIT that runs Whisper or Parakeet locally or cloud models with your own key, detects Zoom, Teams and FaceTime calls, and labels speakers on device.
A macOS dictation app under GPL-3.0 whose README names Superwhisper and Wispr Flow as the tools it replaces, with local models, per-app modes, a personal dictionary and an AI assistant mode.
A speech-to-text app inside the Epicenter monorepo under AGPL-3.0 that records, transcribes with a provider you choose, cloud or local, optionally polishes the text, and pastes it at the cursor.
An Apache-2.0 macOS dictation app that calls Gemini 3.5 Transcribe with your own key, writes audio to disk from the first millisecond for crash safety, and inserts polished text at your cursor without an account.
A free, open-source dictation app for macOS under Apache-2.0 that holds a shortcut, listens, and pastes the text where your cursor is, with Whisper, NVIDIA Parakeet or Apple on-device speech recognition.
An AGPL-3.0 voice typing app for Windows that ships seven local speech models including Nemotron 3.5 ASR and three Qwen3-ASR sizes, with an editable AI cleanup step through Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
An MIT desktop voice assistant for Windows, macOS and Linux that extends Handy's dictation core with a trigger phrase, a local cleanup model, screen-aware answers and Kokoro speech, with no account and no telemetry.
A free, MIT dictation app for macOS that speaks into any prompt box on your Mac, uses Groq for speech and a Codex OAuth token for language-model cleanup, and can also run local Whisper and Qwen models.
A free, MIT push-to-talk dictation app for macOS, Windows and Linux that runs faster-whisper locally by default, learns your vocabulary, and can also send audio to Groq or an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
An MIT-licensed Rust rewrite of hyprwhspr, built as a background daemon that listens for Hyprland shortcuts, transcribes with whisper.cpp or Parakeet locally, or with Groq, Gemini or an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
A free, MIT dictation desktop app that runs Parakeet, Moonshine or Whisper on your own machine, ships an installer for Windows today, and has an optional paid Support tier that unlocks no features.
An MIT-licensed desktop dictation app forked from Handy, with three independent backend modes for speech-to-text and AI cleanup, a wake-word mode and OS-keychain API keys.
An MIT-licensed on-device dictation app for macOS and Windows that tap-triggers Whisper, with Metal acceleration on Apple Silicon through MLX, a searchable local history and a setup wizard.
Questions people ask
What is the best open-source dictation app?
For macOS, Windows and Linux with everything local, Handy (MIT) or OpenWhispr (MIT). For a Mac with per-application modes and a personal dictionary, VoiceInk (GPL-3.0). For choosing your own transcription provider and building from source, Whispering (AGPL-3.0). All four paste the text at your cursor after a hotkey.
Do open-source dictation apps work offline?
Yes. Handy and VoiceInk run the speech model on the machine only and say no audio leaves it. OpenWhispr runs offline with local models or uses cloud models with your own key. Whispering sends audio only when the provider you chose needs an upload. The models are Whisper and, in three of the four, NVIDIA's Parakeet on a CPU.
Which open-source dictation app cleans up the text like Wispr Flow?
OpenWhispr, with a cleanup model you choose from GPT, Claude, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter or a local model, and VoiceInk with its assistant and context-aware modes. Handy pastes what you said; its post-processing toggle is not described in its README.
Is there an open-source dictation app for Windows or Linux?
Handy ships installers for x64 Windows and x64 Linux plus a winget package and a .deb. OpenWhispr ships a Windows .exe and Linux .AppImage, .deb and .rpm files. VoiceInk is macOS only. Whispering builds from source on desktop through Tauri.
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