Ghost Pepper
Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS
Details
- External ID
- 47666024
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Ghost Pepper
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- April 6, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 467
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9884318766066839
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I built this because I wanted to see how far I could get with a voice-to-text app that used 100% local models so no data left my computer. I've been using a ton for coding and emails. Experimenting with using it as a voice interface for my other agents too. 100% open-source MIT license, would love feedback, PRs, and ideas on where to take it.
Enrichment
- Theme
- voice dictation and control tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- speech-to-text for macos
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes This can be built by wrapping Whisper (via whisper.cpp or MLX) inside a macOS menu bar wrapper using Swift or Python with global hotkey listeners.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ChatGPT overlay window, voicetype (open source), macOS native dictation, WhisperKit, NVIDIA Parakeet v3
Concerns raised: Latency/speed slower than alternatives, Accuracy issues with word repetition, Apple sends voice data to servers unless hardware handles locally, No live/streaming transcription display
Feature requests: Automatic paste without requiring shortcut, Configurable formatting commands (e.g., "new line" as action not text), Live streaming transcription display while speaking, Sub-100ms latency performance
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 148 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 149 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 151 days after the earliest competitor.
- Ghost Pepper 🌶️ · ph · 2026-04-14 · 190 upvotes · similarity 0.73
- Ghost Pepper Meet local meeting transcription and diarization · hn · 2026-04-22 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- OpenWhisper · hn · 2026-02-13 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Zumbo · ph · 2026-09-30 · 63 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Elokin · ph · 2026-09-28 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- TongueType · hn · 2026-05-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- typevoice · github · 2026-09-20 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Local Whisper · ph · 2026-09-17 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.