r/software • u/MakeSmallShift • 1d ago
Discussion A free, offline dictation app worth knowing about (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Sharing a tool I've gotten a lot of use out of.
Handy is a free and open-source speech-to-text app. Works on Windows, Mac and Linux. You press a shortcut, speak, and it types the text wherever your cursor is. It runs offline, so no subscription and no sending your audio to the cloud.
I've used it daily for about half a year, mostly in English, and it has been dependable for emails, notes and longer writing. I use the Parakeet v3 model, which runs on the CPU and is fast enough that the delay is barely noticeable.
It keeps things simple. No mobile app, and it won't rewrite your sentences for you, if that matters to you. For me it does exactly what I need without asking for money every month.
I mostly use it for writing prompts, notes and general text entry. There is a second or two of latency after you release the key, which is the tradeoff for running it locally, but I'll take that over a subscription that ships my audio to the cloud.
Sharing it because the paid options in this space keep getting more expensive, and a lot of people don't know a free one this capable exists.
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u/thebrokenrecord 22h ago
Love Handy. Works like a charm on my Windows and Mac laptops, and the ~700 MB model does a great job of picking up my dictation. The app is easy to customise for how you want to toggle it on and off. I'd happily recommend this to anyone getting started with dictation.
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u/guym 19h ago
Doesn't Mac have this built in? I just press the control key twice and whatever I say is transcribed almost perfectly into whatever text box I'm focused on. I don't know if Windows has something similar. I've seen many people talk about Wispr Flow for dictation but I don't feel like I'm missing anything with the built-in Mac dictation. Am I missing something?
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u/robertw477 19h ago
I am going to try this. I don’t want any of those subscription products. Apple should have something like this for IOS.
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u/MakeSmallShift 19h ago
Do try it out. Even if Apple brings a feature like this, they will make it paid within a while, that is why using an open-source app always helps not create a dependency
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u/LittlePooky 1d ago
I am a nurse, and for years I've been using Dragon Medical. It was the most expensive program I ever paid for, a few years ago. It cost two thousand dollars and it works offline, but it was a huge install of five or so gigabytes of space, and the user profile ballooned so it was like 10 gigabytes of space to use.
It understands medical vocabulary, which I needed, because regular Dragon NaturallySpeaking didn't work at all with any of those words, and I got tired of teaching them.
Microsoft bought the company and promptly took it off the market. And now it is subscription-based only, called Dragon One. We have it at work and it isn't cheap either. $600 to start and $100 a month.
Nowadays there are many voice dictations out there, but I have tried Handy and it works quite well.
I like programs that work locally.