Launching today
Lispr
Hold a key, speak, and Lispr writes it anywhere
151 followers
Hold a key, speak, and Lispr writes it anywhere
151 followers
Lispr is a free voice dictation and translation app for Mac and Windows. Hold a key, speak, release. Your words land in whatever app your cursor is in. Speak in ~99 languages and switch mid-sentence. Hold your translation key as well, and the translation lands instead, in any of 32 languages. Median latency 346 ms. The mic is off until you hold the key, and we never store your audio. No account, no model download, free.
Lispr
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I'm Konstantin, co-founder of Codebridge, a software development company. Lispr's first user was me.
Why I built it
My workday is Claude Code sessions, client emails, Teams threads, and spec reviews: thousands of words typed across a dozen apps. Then I noticed that when I dictated instead of typing, I got several times more done. The effect was strongest with AI tools. When you talk to Claude or Cursor, you give whole paragraphs of context you'd never bother to type, and the answers get far better. Typing made me ration what I told the AI.
I wanted one tool that types wherever my cursor is: chat, email, code editor, browser. I tried what was on the market and kept hitting the same walls: multi-gigabyte model downloads, accounts, subscriptions, or latency that sent me back to the keyboard. We're a dev company, so we built our own.
The multilingual part is personal too. We're a Ukrainian company. Ukrainian inside the team, English with clients, and many of our people live abroad and run daily life in a third language. So translation got its own keys: you set two, and holding one along with the dictation key changes what happens when you let go. Release with just the dictation key and you get the transcript; release with a translation key held and the translation lands instead. When you drift between languages mid-sentence (we all do), Lispr follows. No setup, no mode switch.
What Lispr is
A free voice dictation and translation app for Mac and Windows. Hold the key, speak, release. Your words land in whatever app your cursor is in. Hold a translation key too, and on release the translation lands instead of the transcript.
Where it earns its keep:
Draft Slack messages and emails without touching the keyboard
Prompt Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor by voice, with far richer context than you'd type
Write in Notion, Docs, anywhere text goes
Speak in ~99 languages, switch mid-sentence
Teach it your vocabulary, so client names and jargon come out spelled right
Dictate in one language, release, and it lands in another of 32, via two configurable per-language keys. No other Mac dictation tool has this.
Speed and footprint
Median latency is 346 ms from key-release to text on screen, measured server-side on live traffic. The whole app is a 3.67 MB download, with no model file and no GPU requirement. It runs on macOS 11 and later, including Intel Macs, and on Windows.
Privacy, the specifics
Your microphone is off until you hold the key.
Audio streams to a hosted Whisper large-v3-turbo model for transcription. Our servers don't store it, and no transcript content is logged anywhere. The inference provider holds audio up to 30 days only for abuse review, then deletes it.
Nothing trains on your voice, transcripts, or translations unless you opt in, and the opt-in is double-gated.
No account. Download, grant mic permission, start talking.
Is there a catch?
No. Lispr is free and the free tier stays. Codebridge is a profitable consulting company, and Lispr's architecture pays per call, so infrastructure costs scale with usage, not with always-on GPU capacity. It costs us very little to keep free. If we ever add a paid tier, it will be for heavy or team-scale use, never for everyday dictation.
For the PH community
We're reading and answering every comment today. What gets named in this thread will shape what we build next: iOS and Android are already on the list, and the requests here move up the queue.
What I'd love from you
Download it and tell me where it trips: lispr.ai
Which languages do you work in? We built this for multilingual days, and I'm curious how multilingual this community is.
Thanks to our early users in 29+ countries for finding the rough edges, and to @myroslav_budzanivskyi, our CTO, who took Lispr from first commit to a notarized public release in a single day, then shipped 67 releases in the three weeks after.
Konstantin
the no-account, stateless-relay answer to the audit question above was refreshingly honest, more teams would just say "we don't log anything" and leave it there. that raises a question about the vocabulary feature though - if it learns client names and jargon from my dictations over time, that's a profile of sorts even without an account. is that vocabulary list stored purely on-device, or does it live server-side somewhere tied to an install id, since "no persistent identity" and "the app remembers your jargon across sessions" seem like they need to be reconciled somehow
Lispr
@galdayan Fair question, and thank you for reading the audit answer that closely. The vocabulary list is stored only on your device. There is no server-side copy and no install id it's tied to. So "remembers your jargon across sessions" means a local file on your Mac, not a profile on our side. That's how it reconciles with "no persistent identity": the persistence lives on your machine, nothing on our side persists between requests.
@thys_beesman In transcribing the lectures (online or offline) to avoid writing down the lecture notes manually.
Lispr
@thys_beesman Three surprised us.
The biggest: talking to AI tools, vibe coding above all. When your reader is a model, spelling and paragraph breaks stop mattering; the model understands context. So people speak two minutes of context and constraints instead of typing three sentences, and the output gets better. Half our team dictates prompts now, including in the terminal. Lispr's part in this is speed and fidelity: it types your words as you said them, anywhere, fast. The app never rewrites you. The freedom to be loose comes from who's listening.
Second: thinking out loud. Jeremy Caplan of Wonder Tools listed Lispr last week as a free alternative to Wispr, under what he calls "bionic dictation": talking through an idea before the editing impulse kicks in. We built a typing tool and people use it as a thinking tool.
Third is on this page: Katrya's review above, dictated with Lispr 😄
Congrats for you! Wondering how it handles contexts like coding tools versus marketing or social writing, since those are pretty different voice-to-text use cases.
Lispr
@crystalmei Thank you! I'm on the marketing side and use it all day, so here's the honest user answer.
Lispr doesn't change its behavior per app. It types what you said wherever your cursor is, the same way in VS Code and in a LinkedIn post. The difference is in how you use it. In coding tools I don't dictate syntax; I dictate prompts to AI assistants, commit messages, and comments, and that covers most of what a keyboard did for me there. Our CTO dictates code comments through it daily.
For marketing and social writing it's the main way I draft now: long text with full context comes out faster than I could type it.
Two things help across both contexts. It transcribes what you say without rewriting it, so your wording stays yours in both worlds. And there's a vocabulary feature, so product names and client names come out right instead of being "corrected" into dictionary words. It even learns new terms from your dictations.
If you try it in a specific tool and something feels off, tell me which one. The team ships fixes fast.
Nice one love it! How to you plan to make money ? and the trigger key isn't working on my mac i tried multiple of them. maybe add the possibility to add custom one ?
Lispr
@toukoum Thanks Raphaël! On the trigger key: that's not normal, both left and right Option should work out of the box. We're checking the logs on our side right now. Can you tell me which keys you tried and your macOS version? Also check Lispr's settings menu: you can already pick a custom trigger key there, so if Option conflicts with something on your setup, switch it.
On money: the first 1,000 users got Lispr free forever, and the free tier stays for everyone with normal daily use. Down the road we'll charge heavy users, priced in line with similar tools in this space. Running costs are low, so keeping it free is not a trick.
And since you brought up money: if you have ideas on what you'd pay for, I'd love to hear them. That answer is worth more to us than the upvote.
This is the right shape for dictation tools: the trust boundary matters as much as the model. A visible hold-to-talk state, no account, and clear audio handling make it much easier to use in client notes, specs, and prompts without second-guessing the capture path.
Lispr
@krekeltronics Thanks Patrick, you named the design principle better than we did. The trust boundary was a day-one constraint: the mic opens on key-down and closes on release, and macOS's own orange indicator confirms it, so you don't have to take our word for anything. Same reason there's no account. Fewer things to trust means fewer things to audit.
This is a very neat idea. Love the concept. For clarity on Windows, it only uses the right CTRL key right? Which I don't think I ever use for any other purpose so makes a lot of sense!
Just fyi, Chrome is flagging a security risk on download. I wonder if it would be better hosting downloads from a common repository rather than your own site? Although this is obviously an issue that will disappear over time.
Lispr
@martin_tanner Thanks, Martin! Right Ctrl is the default on Windows, but you can remap it in the settings menu. Fair point that this isn't obvious. We'll make the key options easier to find in the UI.
The download flag is a reputation warning. Chrome and Windows show it for any new executable until enough people have downloaded it, wherever it's hosted, so a common repository wouldn't dodge it. We sign every build and it passes the security checks; the warning ages out with download volume, as you guessed. Appreciate the heads-up.