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Posted by tin7in 12 hours ago

Handy – Free open source speech-to-text app(github.com)
151 points | 85 commentspage 3
vladstudio 10 hours ago|
Use it daily. Looks and works great.
mrroryflint 9 hours ago||
On a M4 Macbook Air, there was enough lag to make it unusable for me. I hit the shortcut and start speaking but there was always a 1-2sec delay before it would actually start transcribing even if the icon was displayed.
jborichevskiy 9 hours ago||
Curious if you were using AirPods or other Bluetooth headphones for this?

If so, there should be "keep microphone on" or similar setting in the config that may help with this, alternatively, I set my microphone to my MacBook mic so that my headphones aren't involved at all and there is much less latency on activation

mrroryflint 4 hours ago||
Airpods Max (is that the name?) - the big ones.
kuatroka 8 hours ago|||
Yes, I’ve got the same situation too. I kind of learned to wait for one or two seconds before talking. I am using it with the AirPods, so maybe it’s indeed the Bluetooth thing.
sipjca 9 hours ago||
What microphone are you using?
mrroryflint 4 hours ago||
Airpods Max (is that the name?) - the big ones.
bn-usd-mistake 9 hours ago||
Does anyone have a similar mobile application that works locally and is not too expensive? Mostly looking to transcribe voice messages sent over Signal which does not offer this OOTB
4mitkumar 7 hours ago||
I have been using this one from Futo for quite some time and love it: https://keyboard.futo.org/

They also have a voice input only version if you still would like to keep your typing keyboard: https://voiceinput.futo.org/

bogtap82 9 hours ago|||
There is one single app I've been able to find that offers Parakeet-v3 for free locally and it's called Spokenly. They have paid cloud models available as well, but the local Parakeet-v3 implementation is totally free and is the best STT has to offer these days regardless. Super fast and accurate. I consider single-user STT basically a solved problem at this point.
kuatroka 4 hours ago|||
Spokenly is great too, but Handy's minimalistic and focused UI won me over.
dumbmrblah 3 hours ago|||
Spokenly is my go-to app on iOS for transcription as well.
nerdfax 3 hours ago||
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ekjhgkejhgk 6 hours ago||
Explain to me why a speech-to-text app has 50% of its code in typescript...?
beklein 4 hours ago|
Not the author/contributor, but the app is built using Tauri for easy multi-platform support, so the backend logic is implemented in Rust and the frontend UI is implemented in TypeScript. I think it’s a valid choice. GitHub does not include any model _code_ in the stats; the models will be downloaded separately the first time you use them. Hope this helps.

I know many people hate sites like this, but I actually like them for these use cases. You can get a quick, LLM-generated overview of the architecture, e.g. here: https://codewiki.google/github.com/cjpais/handy

chainmail2029 10 hours ago||
There's a slightly awkward naming overlap with an existing product.
unwind 10 hours ago||
Which one? I did a quick search but that didn't turn up anything so perhaps it's a partial word overlap or something.

I did find the projects "user-facing" home page [1] which was nice. I found it rather hard to find a link from that to the code on GitHub, which was surprising.

[1]: https://handy.computer/

DomB 10 hours ago|||
It's the German word for smart phone / mobile phone
zavec 9 hours ago||||
There's also a sex toy
sReinwald 9 hours ago|||
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ensocode 10 hours ago|||
This is a slightly German-centric comment.
xfeeefeee 9 hours ago||
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skor 8 hours ago||
This is so handy, thank you very much. Good work!!
jborichevskiy 10 hours ago||
Big Handy fan!
dotancohen 11 hours ago||
Looks interesting. Why does it need a GUI at all?
tin7in 10 hours ago||
As an alternative to Wisprflow, Superwhisper and so on. It works really well compared to the commercial competitors but with a local model.
sipjca 9 hours ago|||
It doesn’t! Just makes it more accessible to more people I feel. There’s a cli version for Mac which I wrote first handy-cli
unwind 10 hours ago|||
Ah, that was a typo: you meant "GPU" (Graphics Processing Unit, not "GUI" which of course is Graphical User Interface) since that is listed in the system requirements. Explained implicitly by an existing comment, thanks!
Barbing 11 hours ago|||
I hear a CLI request? Tons of CLI speech-to-text tools by the way, really glad to see this. Excellent competitors (Superwhisper, MacWhisper, etc.) are closed/paid.
kristianp 11 hours ago|||
So more people can use it?
satvikpendem 10 hours ago||
Because local AI models run well on a GPU, better than on a CPU
laylower 7 hours ago||
Is it deployed locally or does it send data to your servers?
sipjca 6 hours ago|
It’s all local
mixtureoftakes 5 hours ago||
Which model would be the best to use for mandarin? Are there any models on par with Parakeet that are just as fast but also understand Chinese?
mixtureoftakes 5 hours ago||
also is there a way to make parakeet type more naturally? less capitallization, less punctuation? can this be a setting?

this can already be done via local llm processing the text but surely there is an easier way to do this, right

Dnguyen 9 hours ago|
Would be nice if the output can be piped directly into Claude Code.
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