Wordmate
local speech-to-text for macOS
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Hi HN!I built Wordmate because I wanted WisprFlow-style dictation locally on my machine. It’s a free macOS app. Audio and transcripts never leave your Mac.Speech recognition uses Parakeet and optional post-processing uses a tuned Qwen3 0.6B 4-bit to improve punctuation and capitalization and clean up fillers, stutters, and spoken corrections.The complete transcription pipeline is open source: https://github.com/vdszds/wordmateYou can download the app at https://wordmate.sh. I’d appreciate your feedback!
HN · launched Sep 3, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 87%) · 0 views
Niche: voice dictation software · 224 launches, 16 in the last 7 days ▼ -30% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- B2C
- AI-native
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 224 launches in voice dictation software →
Could you build this?
Partial Packaging local ML models into a macOS menu bar/dictation utility can be initiated with AI, but zero-latency audio pipeline capture, native virtual keyboard injection, and quantized on-device CoreML/Metal optimization require systems-level macOS expertise.
What it would actually take: Built using Swift/AppKit with CoreAudio/AVFoundation for background microphone stream capture and Accessibility APIs to emulate keystroke paste insertion. On-device inference requires CoreML or llama.cpp/MLX runtime integration running a quantized Parakeet STT model alongside a 4-bit Qwen3 LLM. Overcoming audio latency, system permissions, and memory pressure on lower-tier Apple Silicon chips requires deep macOS systems development knowledge.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 723 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #703 of 724 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 301 days after the earliest competitor.
- Wordbird: free dictation for Mac running Nvidia Parakeet locally · hn · 2026-03-25 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.67
- Say the Word · ph · 2026-10-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- VoiceNoodler · ph · 2026-10-26 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- WhisperWrite · ph · 2026-10-09 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- Private voice-to-text for macOS using Apple's SpeechAnalyzer · hn · 2026-01-04 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- betterwispr · github · 2026-10-07 · 112 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- SpeechFast · ph · 2026-10-18 · 78 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Murmur · ph · 2026-11-02 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.58
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