Open Wispr

Open Wispr occupies a narrow but genuinely useful slot: it is the no-cost, no-cloud option in a macOS dictation market where almost everything else is either a subscription or a closed-source app. The core loop is exactly what the homepage describes — hold Globe, speak, release, text lands at the cursor — and because it runs through whisper.cpp with Metal acceleration, transcription is real-time or faster on M1 and above. The privacy story is unusually concrete rather than a vague promise: audio goes to a temp file, gets transcribed locally, and is deleted, with zero network requests. If you want recordings kept, you set maxRecordings to 1-100 and they stay on your machine as .wav files; the default is 0, storing nothing. The engineering choices are consistently lightweight. No Electron, no app bundle to drag, no account, no telemetry — it installs with a single curl command that taps the Homebrew formula, walks you through Accessibility and Microphone permissions, downloads base.en (142 MB) on first launch, and then sits in your menu bar as a background service. Everything is configured through one file with roughly eight options: hotkey (Globe 63, Right Option 61, F5 96, or any key code, with modifiers for chords), modelSize, language, spokenPunctuation, maxRecordings, and toggleMode for press-to-start/stop instead of hold-to-talk. The model menu is the interesting part for buyers weighing accuracy against disk and RAM. tiny.en is 75 MB and fastest; base.en is 142 MB and the default balance; small.en is 466 MB for more accuracy; medium.en is 1.5 GB; large-v3-turbo is 1.6 GB for fast multilingual work; large-v3 is 3 GB for best accuracy and wants an M1 Pro or better. Quantized -q5_0, -q5_1, and -q8_0 variants cut that to roughly a third to half the size with minimal quality loss. Multilingual support covers 99 languages, but you have to move off a .en model and set an ISO 639-1 code — the default base.en is English-only. The weaknesses are equally clear and mostly a matter of taste. Configure-and-restart is a developer's workflow, not a normal person's, and the maintainer is an individual with no formal support channel. There is no graphical settings panel, no auto-update mechanism beyond running brew upgrade yourself, and deliberately no AI rewriting, formatting, summarization, or assistant features — that is a design decision, not an oversight. Anyone who wants a dictation tool to also clean up their prose should look at VoiceInk, which adds AI features and app-specific modes but is GPLv3 rather than MIT, or accept the cloud trade-off with Wispr Flow. And the Apple Silicon and macOS 13+ requirement is hard: Intel Macs do not work here at all. For the specific person who wants free, local, fast voice typing and is comfortable in a terminal, Open Wispr is close to ideal.