Mumble Dictation
local dictation that learns your vocabulary
Details
- External ID
- 49028737
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- —
- Website domain
- —
- Launched
- July 23, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.2873357228195938
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hey HN! It’s Wen from Narya.ai. We build Mumble Dictation, a local-first and privacy-focused dictation app on Mac.Homepage and Download: https://heymumble.com/dictationYouTube：https://youtu.be/Bma59TrR62c?si=DM-LyjZY5GZ9-f64Two things kept bugging us about the dictation products on the market:1. Most of them ship your audio to the cloud, and those who is claiming to be private are often just a thin wrapper of cloud APIs with a privacy policy.2. Those general-purpose ASR models are terrible at your vocabulary: library names, co-workers' names, project codenames, etc.Mumble Dictation is built around those problems. Its full pipeline including ASR and transcript cleanup is running on your device with local models. Your audio never leaves your machine. Plus, it collects the hot words in your daily usage and gets them spelled correctly.In particular, the app learns from what you type and what's on your screen, entirely locally, and builds a personal dictionary. At inference time, we boost those terms during decoding, so "Supabase", "PowerSync", or your teammate's name comes out right the first time, instead of some phonetic guess. The dictionary never leaves your machine for sure.A few other things it does:- Multilingual (40 languages)- Custom transcript transform (concise, bullet points, translate, or any prompt you can define yourself)- Bring your own API key (OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, etc.) if you want a different LLM model for transcript cleanup- Voice shortcuts: say "buy paper towels" and it opens Amazon with the search filled in, or "ask Claude about dictation apps" and it opens Claude with your question already submittedPricing is a one-time purchase, no subscription. It's $50 at launch (half the planned price).Happy to answer questions here.
Enrichment
- Theme
- ai voice dictation and transcription tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- local dictation that learns your vocabulary
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A basic local dictation menu-bar app using Whisper is straightforward, but personalizing on-device vocabulary learning and low-latency acoustic adaptation requires specialized on-device ML engineering.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires macOS Swift/AppKit with Accessibility APIs for text insertion, integrated with an on-device ASR engine (whisper.cpp or Apple SpeechAnalyzer). The hard part is the personalized vocabulary engine, which requires dynamic language model rescoring, custom lexicon injection/WFST adaptation, or fine-tuning without significant latency or catastrophic forgetting on client hardware. This requires speech recognition domain expertise and low-level ML optimization.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: local ASR pipeline
Concerns raised: homophone disambiguation in personal dictionary, bluetooth mic quality as bottleneck
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 195 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #169 of 196 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 259 days after the earliest competitor.
- Utter, a local-first dictation app for Mac and iPhone · hn · 2026-03-08 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- TongueType · hn · 2026-05-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- ZenVoice · ph · 2026-09-28 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Pines Voice · ph · 2026-09-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Yap · hn · 2026-07-27 · 104 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Wordbird: free dictation for Mac running Nvidia Parakeet locally · hn · 2026-03-25 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Shall We Talk · ph · 2026-09-18 · 62 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Dicty.io · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
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.