Open-source Wispr Flow alternatives

Handy is a cross-platform desktop application for speech-to-text. You press a configurable keyboard shortcut, speak, and the transcribed words appear in the text field you are working in. Everything happens on your own computer, so audio is never sent to a cloud service. It is written in Rust with Tauri, released under the MIT license, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Recording can be set to hold-to-talk, toggle, or both. Silence is filtered with Silero voice activity detection, and transcription uses a model of your choice: Whisper models in several sizes with GPU acceleration when available, or the CPU-optimized Parakeet V3 with automatic language detection. The project states its aims as free, open source, private and simple, treating accessibility tooling as something that should not sit behind a paywall. Installers are on the releases page and website, with Homebrew available on macOS.

Tambourine is a personal voice interface that turns speech into text wherever your cursor is. You press a hotkey, speak, and the words are typed into emails, messages, documents, code editors or terminals without copy-pasting. It is positioned as an open-source alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper and Willow, for people who want faster input than typing or who want to reduce keyboard strain.

Unlike raw transcription, it uses AI to tidy the text by removing filler words, adding punctuation and applying a personal dictionary for technical terms and names. You choose the speech-to-text provider from options such as Cartesia, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Speechmatics, Azure, AWS, Google, Groq and OpenAI, and the language model from options such as Cerebras, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq and OpenRouter. It can also run fully locally with Whisper and Ollama. Prompts and formatting rules can be customized.

The app is cross-platform and built with Rust, Tauri, Python and TypeScript on the Pipecat framework. It is licensed under AGPL-3.0. A hosted service is listed as coming soon with a waitlist, so for now you run the server yourself.