Launching today
Lispr
Hold a key, speak, and Lispr writes it anywhere
97 followers
Hold a key, speak, and Lispr writes it anywhere
97 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
@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.
Uppply
Congrats on the launch!
just wanted to understand how is @Lispr different from Wispr flow?
Lispr
@malikankush Thanks! Two differences matter most.
Speed. Lispr pre-warms the connection when you press the key and streams audio while you speak, so the production median is 346 ms from release to text. Side by side, that's the difference you feel in the first minute.
Translation. Hold a second key and your words land translated, in any of 32 languages. Wispr Flow transcribes in many languages but doesn't advertise translation. The case our users love: vibe coding. Models are trained mostly on English, and English prompts burn fewer tokens. So you think out loud in Ukrainian or Spanish, hold the translation key, and a clean English prompt lands in your terminal.
Also free, no account. Full comparison, including where Wispr Flow wins: lispr.ai/blog/lispr-vs-wispr-flow
Lispr
Hey Product Hunt! CTO here. I wrote most of Lispr's code, so I'll take the technical questions today.
The problem that started this: every dictation flow we tried did the same thing. Record a file, upload it, wait for the transcript. That round trip takes 1.5 to 2.5 seconds, and at that speed you stop trusting the tool and go back to typing.
So we built Lispr around one idea: the network work should happen while you speak, not after. The moment you press the key, we pre-warm the TLS connection. While you talk, audio is compressed to Opus and streamed out in 20 ms packets. By the time you release the key, most of the work is already done. Median latency in production is 346 ms across tens of thousands of dictations. That's the difference between "waiting for a tool" and "it just types."
The app itself is native Swift and AppKit. 3.67 MB, universal binary, runs on macOS 11+, including old Intel Macs. No 2 to 3 GB model download before first use.
The line we will not cross: no account, no transcript logging, and nothing trains a model unless you explicitly opt in. Our relay doesn't store your audio. We built it this way because we dictate our own emails, docs, and code comments through it all day.
Pro tip: nothing types while you speak, and nothing gets sent for you. Text lands at your cursor when you release the key, so in a chat it sits in the input field until you press Enter yourself. Don't like how it came out? Delete it and say it again. And if you hold your translation key as well, what lands is the translation instead, in any of 32 languages.
I'll be in the comments all day. Tell me where it breaks, which app it misbehaves in, and how it runs on your Windows machine. Honest technical feedback is the most useful thing you can give us today.
@myroslav_budzanivskyi Since Lispr relies on a cloud-based pipeline to achieve its ~350ms latency, what technical guarantees such as independent audits or ephemeral processing can you provide to ensure that my audio or transcripts are truly not being logged or used by your ASR providers, especially when I am not in a 'zero data retention' mode?
Lispr
@makimum_dev Fair question, and I'll answer it in two layers, because the honest answer has two layers.
What I can guarantee, because we wrote the code: our relay is stateless. It forwards audio and returns text. It has no storage attached, and no transcript content appears in our logs. There's no account, so there's nothing to attach a profile to. You can watch the traffic yourself: one request out while the key is held, one response back.
What depends on our speech provider: their published policy is retention of audio for up to 30 days for abuse review, then deletion. It is not used for training. That's a policy commitment from a company with enterprise customers, not a cryptographic guarantee, and I won't pretend otherwise.
On independent audits: we don't have one. We're a small team a few months in, and a real audit costs real money. It's on the roadmap along with per-device attestation. If you need audited zero-retention today, an on-device tool is the right call for you, and I mean that without irony. The trade you make there is a 2 to 3 GB model download and slower output.
Nothing trains a model unless you flip an explicit opt-in, and that opt-in is off by default.
Lispr
I do marketing for Lispr. But I'm writing this as its heaviest user, because the tool changed how I work before it ever became my job to talk about it.
The biggest surprise was my AI workflow. When I typed prompts, I kept them short and got generic answers back. Speaking, I give the model two minutes of context, examples, and constraints without thinking about my fingers, and the answers improved to the point where colleagues asked what I changed.
The second thing: I live in Poland and run my life in three languages. Ukrainian with family, English at work, Polish everywhere else. Switching the output language is one extra key held at release, so I think in Ukrainian and the message lands in English. Of everything in the app this is what I'd pay for.
Ask me anything about how we use it day to day. The founders are in this thread too.
I've been using Lispr on my mac almost every day, and it's honestly become one of those apps I keep coming back to. I work in marketing and also do mentoring, so I spend a huge chunk of my day writing feedback, docs, slack messages, briefs etc. It doesn't magically write everything for me, but it cuts the time I spend writing by a lot. Funny enough, I used Lispr to write this review too 😄
If your job involves writing a lot, I'd definitely recommend giving it a try.
Lispr
@katrya_syrotynska A review dictated through the product it reviews. That's the best QA report we got today 😄 Thank you!
"It doesn't write everything for me, but it cuts the time" is exactly the bar we aim for. Lispr types what you say and stays out of the rest. Curious which part of your day it took over first: the Slack messages or the briefs?
@konstantin_karpushin1 definitely Slack first! I write a lot of feedback during the day, so that was an instant win. Briefs were next. At this point, if I know I'm about to write more than a sentence, I instinctively open Lispr 🙏
Lispr
@katrya_syrotynska "More than a sentence" is the threshold we hear from users again and again. Below it, typing wins. Above it, speaking does.
One tip for the feedback and briefs: add your clients' and product names in the Vocabulary section of settings. Lispr also learns new terms from your dictations once a day, but seeding the important names gets the spelling right from the first dictation. Thanks for being here today 🙏