open-wispr.com
Local, private voice dictation for macOS. Hold a key, speak, release — your words appear at the cursor.
Everything runs on-device. No audio or text ever leaves your machine.

Powered by whisper.cpp with Metal acceleration on Apple Silicon.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/human37/open-wispr/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

The script handles everything: installs via Homebrew, walks you through granting permissions, downloads the Whisper model, and starts the service. You'll see live feedback as each step completes.

Note: Recent versions of Homebrew (6.0+) have tightened security around third-party taps, so you may be asked to trust this package before it installs. If that happens, the installer prints the exact brew trust command to run.

A waveform icon appears in your menu bar when it's running.

The default hotkey is the Globe key (🌐, bottom-left). Hold it, speak, release.

OpenWispr uses fast input-only audio capture by default. On macOS 14 and later, optional Voice Processing adds system echo/noise processing but can slow recording startup and reduce playback volume while recording. Enable it from the menu bar if needed.

Full installation guide — permissions walkthrough with screenshots, non-English macOS instructions, and troubleshooting.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/human37/open-wispr/main/scripts/uninstall.sh | bash

This stops the service, removes the formula, tap, config, models, app bundle, logs, and permissions.

Edit ~/.config/open-wispr/config.json:

{
  "hotkey": { "keyCode": 63, "modifiers": [] },
  "modelSize": "base.en",
  "language": "en",
  "spokenPunctuation": false,
  "whisperPrompt": "Use punctuation and capitalization.",
  "voiceActivityDetection": false,
  "voiceProcessing": false,
  "vadThreshold": 0.5,
  "maxRecordings": 0,
  "toggleMode": false,
  "soundFeedback": false
}

Then restart: brew services restart open-wispr

To bind multiple hotkeys, use the hotkeys array instead:

{
  "hotkeys": [
    { "keyCode": 63, "modifiers": [] },
    { "keyCode": 96, "modifiers": [] }
  ]
}

Both hotkey (single) and hotkeys (array) are supported. If both are present, hotkeys takes precedence.

Caps Lock cannot be used as a hotkey: macOS toggles its state rather than sending a release event, so it cannot provide reliable hold-to-talk behavior.

Larger models are more accurate but slower and use more memory. The default base.en is a good balance for most users.

Each model also has quantized -q5_0 / -q5_1 / -q8_0 variants at ~⅓–½ the disk and RAM with minimal quality loss. See MODELS.md for the complete list and tradeoffs.

Non-English languages: Models ending in .en are English-only. To use another language, switch to the equivalent multilingual model (e.g. base.en → base, or large-v3-turbo for the fastest large-tier option) and set the language field to your language code. Multilingual models are slightly less accurate for English but support 99 languages.

If the Globe key opens the emoji picker: System Settings → Keyboard → "Press 🌐 key to" → "Do Nothing"

Click the waveform icon for status and options. Recent Recordings lists your last recordings; click one to re-transcribe and copy the result to the clipboard.

If no text field is focused, the transcription is copied to the clipboard automatically. Copy Last Dictation in the menu bar also lets you copy the most recent transcription again.

open-wispr is completely local. Audio is recorded to a temp file, transcribed by whisper.cpp on your CPU/GPU, and the temp file is deleted. No network requests are made except to download the Whisper model on first run and the VAD model if enabled. Optionally, you can configure open-wispr to store a number of past recordings locally via the maxRecordings setting. Those recordings stay private and on your machine, and we default to not storing anything.

See what's planned and in progress on the public roadmap. Feature requests and ideas are welcome as issues.

git clone https://github.com/human37/open-wispr.git
cd open-wispr
brew install whisper-cpp
swift build -c release
.build/release/open-wispr start

open-wispr is free and always will be. If you find it useful, you can leave a tip.

MIT