OpenWispr
Local speech to text
Press a hotkey, talk, and the text lands wherever your cursor is. The speech model runs on the Mac: no network call anywhere in the dictation path.
OpenWispr is a small menu-bar app for macOS. Press Fn + Option, speak, and press Fn + Option again to stop. The words appear in whatever app has your cursor: an editor, a terminal, Slack, Gmail or Notes.
Moonshine does the transcription as you speak, on the Mac's CPU, with an English model that ships inside the app. There is no account, no telemetry and no subscription, and it keeps working with the network unplugged.
What it does
- One hotkey, Fn + Option, starts and stops dictation in any app; the transcript lands at the cursor.
- Two ways to insert text: clipboard paste, which puts your clipboard back about 120 ms later, or synthesized keystrokes, which leave the clipboard alone.
- A small listening pill with a live mic-level meter shows that the mic is hearing you.
- A self-test checks the microphone and Accessibility permissions, the model and the hotkey, and the menu-bar icon shows the result.
- Written in Swift: no Electron, no Python runtime. It lives in the menu bar, with no Dock icon.
What it doesn't do
- No network call anywhere in the dictation path: no analytics SDK, no telemetry.
- Audio never leaves the Mac. The speech model runs locally, on the CPU.
- No account, no keys, no subscription.
- Needs only two permissions, Microphone and Accessibility.
Good to know
- The current release, v0.1.1, runs on Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 13 or later. It is a 337 MB download that unpacks to about 500 MB, most of it the speech model.
- It is not notarized yet, so the first launch needs a one-time approval in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
- English only for now, and in v0.1 the hotkey is fixed to Fn + Option.
Get it
Download OpenWispr.zip from the latest release, unzip it and drag OpenWispr to Applications. Grant Microphone and Accessibility when asked, click Restart OpenWispr in its Settings window, then press Fn + Option. To build from source, clone moonshine-ai/moonshine next to the repository and run ./scripts/run-dev.sh.
Full guide: seeknull.github.io/openwispr Download v0.1.1 github.com/seeknull/openwispr