Hi Product Hunt! I'm Sven, and I built Lowspeak so I could talk instead of type in any app on my Mac.

How it works: hold fn, talk, let go. The text appears where your cursor is: in Mail, Slack, your editor or the terminal.

What makes it different:

• Online and offline: Groq or OpenAI with your own key, or Whisper and NVIDIA Parakeet entirely on your Mac. If the network drops, a local model takes over the same recording.

• Free and fast online: on Groq's free plan, transcription costs nothing within its daily limits. Lowspeak opens the connection while you are still speaking, so the text is there about 0.4 seconds after you let go.

• Ultrafast and small: 100% Rust on native AppKit, no Electron. 17 MB on disk, about 45 MB of memory online.

• More than dictation: a vocabulary for names and terms, optional cleanup of filler words and grammar, formatting for the app you dictate into, a hands-free mode for up to five minutes, your last ten dictations in the menu, 35 languages.

• Open source: MIT or Apache-2.0, no account, no telemetry.

It runs on macOS 14 or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel. With Homebrew: brew install --cask sventmueller/tap/lowspeak

Where does dictation still let you down: accents, technical terms, a language that comes out wrong? I'd love to hear it.