Maintains the project and reads every issue. Bug reports are more useful than feature requests right now, and both are welcome.
About
Dictation got good. The apps around it did not.
Speech recognition quietly got very good, and then most of it got locked behind a subscription that uploads your voice to somebody’s server. That trade made sense when the models were too big to run anywhere else. It stopped making sense a while ago, and nobody told the pricing pages.
What we are building
OpenSTT is a dictation app that runs the model on your own machine and types the result into whatever window has focus. No integration to wait for, no browser extension, no per-app support matrix. If you can type into it, you can talk into it.
Because the transcription happens locally, there is no upload step to opt out of. That is not a privacy setting we are proud of, it is an absence of one, which is a much easier thing to verify. The code is MIT licensed and the repository is public for exactly that reason.
It is in open beta. macOS is stable enough for daily use, Windows and Linux are in testing, and iOS has not been started. That list lives on the homepage and gets updated as things land.
Who is behind it
Small project, and contributions are the reason it moves. The repository is the best place to start.
What we hold to
Local is the default, not the upsell
The on-device models are the product. Hosted transcription exists for people who want the largest model without the download, and it stays switched off until you switch it on.
Auditable beats trustworthy
Every privacy claim on this site is checkable in the repository. We would rather you read the microphone code than take our word about it.
Free where it costs us nothing
Local transcription runs on your hardware, so charging for it would be rent. It will always be free, and the licence makes that permanent rather than a promise.
Ship the bug list
The build status table on the homepage names what is untested. A beta that hides its edges wastes the time of the people helping you find them.