FnScribe
Open-source, offline dictation for macOS
Details
- External ID
- 49475159
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- FnScribe
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Aug. 28, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 36
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8245967741935484
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
Description
I built FnScribe because I'm pretty privacy concious and wanted a wispr flow-like app that kept everything local and on device. Currently works for Mac (sillicon and intel).It's dead simple. Hold the fn key, speak and release. I use a quantized Wisper small.en model for transcription. It inserts the text into the active application. There's also a hands-free model for longer dictation. Audio transcription is kept in memory. There's no account or transcription history. Clipboard contents are restored after it inserts it. GPLv3, Mac-only, English only..still in alpha. Hope you enjoy it! Would love some feedback.
Enrichment
- Theme
- ai voice dictation and transcription tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- offline dictation for macos
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a native macOS menu bar app that captures global keyboard shortcuts (Fn key), records microphone input, runs local Whisper transcription (via whisper.cpp), and emulates keystrokes to insert text.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Whisper (OpenAI), Wisperflow, Ghost Pepper, Hex, handy.computer
Concerns raised: Space is extremely saturated with similar apps, Cognitive load/difficulty for users choosing between many similar options, Model collapse risk from LLMs training on lower-quality generated code, Quality degradation as ratio of slop to quality code increases, Many apps released daily with limited differentiation
Feature requests: iOS app or sideload support, Real-time AI voice conversion for gaming/voiceover use cases, OBS plugin integration, Multilingual support, App Store availability
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 211 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #52 of 212 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 295 days after the earliest competitor.
- Pines Voice · ph · 2026-09-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- VoxKey · ph · 2026-09-12 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- Dictantor · ph · 2026-09-08 · 121 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Yap · hn · 2026-07-27 · 104 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- TongueType · hn · 2026-05-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Witness for Mac · ph · 2026-09-23 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Utter, a local-first dictation app for Mac and iPhone · hn · 2026-03-08 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- LocalScribe. Transcribe locally on Mac. · ph · 2026-09-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.54
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.