Petal
Free, open-source voice-to-text for Mac. Fully local.
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Aayush

Petal - Free, open-source voice-to-text for Mac. Fully local.

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Petal is a native macOS menu bar app for voice-to-text that runs entirely on your Mac. No cloud, no account, no subscription. Choose from 6 models across 4 providers — Apple Speech (built-in), Whisper Large V3 Turbo, Whisper Tiny, Qwen3 ASR 0.6B, and Voxtral Mini 3B in bf16 and 8-bit. Smart Mode on Voxtral strips filler words and cleans up your speech on-device. Push-to-talk or toggle, auto-pastes into whatever app you are using. Fully open source, MIT licensed, free forever.

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Aayush
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hey everyone — i built Petal because i was tired of voice-to-text apps that only support Whisper or require a cloud subscription. i wanted something that runs fully on-device with real model choice. Petal sits in your menu bar and supports 6 models across 4 providers: Apple Speech (zero download, built-in), Whisper Large V3 Turbo + Tiny via WhisperKit, Qwen3 ASR via MLX Audio, and Voxtral Mini 3B via MLX. the Voxtral models have a Smart Mode that strips filler words and cleans up your speech into proper prose — all locally. compared to SuperWhisper and WhisperFlow, Petal gives you more model options beyond just Whisper variants, and it is completely free and open source (MIT). no account, no cloud, no subscription. push-to-talk or toggle mode, auto-pastes into whatever app you are using. macOS 14+, Apple Silicon only. would love feedback — especially on which models you find most useful for different tasks.