I built Open WhisperScribe after struggling with the complexity, paywalls, or limitations of most speech-to-text tools for macOS and elsewhere. My main requirements were:

Simple, <5-min setup

Runs fully offline, locally (no data leaves your machine)

Works seamlessly in any app — just press a hotkey, speak, and your words appear where your cursor is (code editors, terminal, you name it)

Fast and distraction-free

It uses OpenAI’s Whisper model under the hood, but wraps it in a lightweight CLI tool that sits quietly in the background. The project is open source (Apache 2.0). Setup is a single script, everything is automated.

Demo, install info, and details: https://github.com/nisrulz/open-whisperscribe

Feedback and constructive criticism is welcome!