OpenWhispr
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.
What it does
OpenWhispr's README calls it "the open-source and free alternative to WisprFlow and Granola". Press a hotkey, speak, and the text appears at your cursor. A second hotkey dictates in one language and pastes another.
It covers two jobs. The first is dictation, with local models (Whisper, NVIDIA Parakeet, Cohere Transcribe and others) or cloud models through your own API key, and a language-model cleanup step that can use GPT, Claude, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter or a local model. The second is meetings: the README describes auto-detecting Zoom, Teams and FaceTime calls, live speaker labelling with voice fingerprints that carry across meetings, calendar integration with Google, Microsoft and Apple, and notes with folders and semantic search.
It also imports audio and video files including YouTube links, exposes a public API and an MCP server, and offers enterprise sign-on. Local Whisper is GPU-accelerated on Metal, CUDA and Vulkan.
What it replaces
For dictation it replaces Wispr Flow and Superwhisper, and it is the only app in that group that also runs on Linux with a cleanup step. For meetings it replaces Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai on the machine you are on, with the speaker labels done locally.
Where it falls short: it does not join a call as a bot on your behalf, the way Otter and Fireflies do. Notes sync and team spaces run through OpenWhispr's hosted cloud. Export formats are not listed in the README.
How it runs
Installers for macOS (.dmg for both chips), Windows (.exe) and Linux (.AppImage, .deb, .rpm, .tar.gz). From source it needs Node.js 24 or later. It is an Electron app built on whisper.cpp and sherpa-onnx. The maintainers run OpenWhispr Cloud for sync and sharing, and team spaces are described as free for signed-in users; the README states no prices.
Who it fits
A team that wants dictation and meeting notes in one app, on all three desktop platforms, with the option to keep every model local. Someone who only wants a dictation key with nothing else running should look at Handy.
Limits the README states
On Intel Macs, live speaker identification and voice fingerprinting are unavailable because the runtime they depend on stopped shipping Intel macOS builds, and notes search falls back to keyword matching.
Sources
- OpenWhispr README and MIT LICENSE: github.com/OpenWhispr/openwhispr, read 2026-09-16.
More voice dictation apps
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 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.
Added September 16, 2026. Found an error on this page? Write to reveneau@licheo.com and it gets fixed in the next weekly pass.
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