Hold a key, speak, release. Your words appear at the cursor. Powered by whisper.cpp with Metal acceleration. No audio or text ever leaves your machine.
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/human37/open-wispr/main/scripts/install.sh)"
See it in action
How it works
Powered by Whisper
Whisper is an open-source speech recognition model from OpenAI, trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual audio. It's widely regarded as the most accurate general-purpose transcription model available.
open-wispr runs Whisper locally through whisper.cpp, a high-performance C/C++ port by Georgi Gerganov that takes advantage of Apple's Metal GPU framework for hardware-accelerated inference on Apple Silicon.
Unlike Apple's built-in dictation, Whisper handles punctuation, technical jargon, code terms, and accented speech far more reliably. And unlike cloud dictation services, nothing is ever sent to a server.
Install flow
base.en model (142 MB) downloads on first launch. You can change this later.Features
Audio is recorded to a temp file, transcribed locally, and deleted. Zero network requests. No accounts, no telemetry, no cloud.
Runs on Apple Silicon GPU via whisper.cpp and Metal. Transcription is real-time or faster on M1 and above.
Text appears at your cursor in any app. Editors, browsers, terminals, Slack, email. No plugins or integrations needed.
Choose your hotkey, model size, and language. One command to change, one restart to apply. Everything in the terminal.
Supports 99 languages via Whisper's multilingual models. Set an ISO 639-1 code in the config and use a non-.en model.
No Electron. No app bundle to drag. Installs via Homebrew, runs as a background service. Sits quietly in your menu bar.
Configuration
open-wispr set-hotkey globe # default open-wispr set-hotkey rightoption # Right Option open-wispr set-hotkey f5 # F5 open-wispr set-hotkey ctrl+space # Ctrl + Space brew services restart open-wispr
open-wispr set-model tiny.en # 75 MB, fastest open-wispr set-model base.en # 142 MB, default open-wispr set-model small.en # 466 MB, accurate open-wispr set-model medium.en # 1.5 GB, best brew services restart open-wispr
Or edit the config file directly at ~/.config/open-wispr/config.json and restart the service.
What people say
"I use this with Claude Code every day. Hold the key, say what I want, and it just types it out. No more switching between keyboard and some dictation app. It's perfect for long prompts."