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111 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4FrigadeHQ
yap
Swift2026–2026
FrigadeHQ / yap
yap
Free, open source voice dictation for macOS. On-device transcription with Apple's Speech framework. No cloud/no API keys/no account.
2Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
476GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Free, open source voice dictation for macOS. On-device transcription with Apple's Speech framework. No cloud/no API keys/no account.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by week3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2026-07-27 18:36:02 UTC to 2026-08-31 22:23:58 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 27 | 2026-07-27 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-08-03 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Aug 3 | 2026-08-03 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-08-10 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 10 | 2026-08-10 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-08-17 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 17 | 2026-08-17 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-08-24 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 24 | 2026-08-24 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-08-31 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 31 | 2026-08-31 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-09-07 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesDFdfltr·Aug 31, 2026
Or https://github.com/FrigadeHQ/yap which is the only one I've seen so far that uses the new/improved speech-to-text API in MacOS 26 that outperforms the Whisper models. I expect most dictation software is going to start supporting the local API pretty soon, it's free real estate.
In Show HN: FnScribe – Open-source, offline dictation for macOSThat would be a super trivial fork actually! You basically just need this file https://github.com/FrigadeHQ/yap/blob/main/Sources/Services/... and then wrap a cli around it :)
In Show HN: Yap – OSS on-device voice dictation for macOS with no model to downloadShow HN: Yap – OSS on-device voice dictation for macOS with no model to download
Hey HN! I wanted to share this OSS project I've been working on.
It's called Yap and its a small menu-bar app for macOS that does voice to text for any input. You'll set a hotkey, press it, talk, press it again, and the text gets pasted into whatever field you were in. Everything runs locally and never leaves your computer. Fully OSS and MIT licensed.
With macOS 26, Apple recently added two new APIs, SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber, that do streaming on-device speech to text using models the OS ships and manages. So the app ships no model of its own and loads nothing before the first word. A recent benchmark put Apple's model slightly ahead of Whisper Small on accuracy and about 3x faster (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894752). On Mac, there's really no need anymore to download models or pay for expensive APIs.
A lot of
Read the rest
existing dictation tools do one of a few things I wanted to avoid with this OSS project. They either:
- cost money (for something that's literally built into the OS)
- bundle memory-intensive models (e.g. Whisper or Parakeet)
- webapps wrapped in Electron
- Intel macs straight up don't work
- closed source
- use third-party APIs that will have access to all your transcripts
It's around 3,000 lines of native Swift in a 4 MB app and idles near 60 MB of memory. Audio comes off AVAudioEngine into SpeechAnalyzer with volatile results turned on for the live preview, history is stored in SwiftData. There's no network code in it at all.
Repo and a demo available here: https://github.com/FrigadeHQ/yap
Happy to answer questions and would love to hear any feature requests!