HN

Comments (28)

• Ducki
  Does the built-in dictation not use these models or why would I use this app instead of Apple's own dictation?
• jwr
  Incidentally, I've been testing a lot of dictation apps and models. I am on macOS Sequoia and intend to skip Tahoe altogether, so newer Apple models were not an option. I also dictate in multiple languages.I mostly use the MacWhisper app until now, but I got frustrated by its slow development and lack of focus and dictation. So I tried the free TypeWhisper app. It works very well, but then I tested multiple models and my conclusion was that one cannot beat the Whisper Large v3 model for accuracy. I tried Qwen ASR (very good, but only for English), Voxtral (spoke Polish to it and it wrote Russian, BIG oopsie), Parakeet TDT 3 (very fast, but sometimes inaccurate).I got frustrated by the speed of the Whisper Large model. So I spent an hour with AI benchmarking, testing and developing a new plugin. Turns out that on a modern Mac with a good GPU you can run the Whisper Large model at roughly the same speed as the tiny Parakeet model. 2-3x faster than what other apps ship. It's just that nobody bothered.So, I am now happily dictating into TypeWhisper and then feeding the dictated text into a local gemma-4-26b-a4b-qat LLM for corrections. Everything happens instantly.
• Menu

  9dev
  Amazing! This is something I wanted to look into too.The Apple Foundation models SDKs are surprisingly cool. I recently started working on a personal productivity app that tries to keep track of all the projects I work on, and the ideas and initiatives within these. It does so by creating a graph of events, fed by Claude transcripts and the git and browser history, then letting FM summarize and describe all events; that in turn feeds a semantic search index in an SQLite database.What I have now is an app that shows me where all my projects stand, what I last worked on, where I left forks behind (like deciding for one idea and doing something else "later"), and how to get back into something I wasn’t working on for a while. It also has a built-in MCP server, so I can ask Claude code about any past event or decision or roughly-similar keyword, and it’ll get sensible answers back!Called the thing Pensieve :-)However, one thing still missing is actually being able to ask it directly, or talk to it, so Yap looks like a great opportunity to learn!
• Menu

  heresalexandria
  I don't think get it unless I'm missing something - how is this different from just using the built in Mac OS dictation feature?At first I thought it was going to be a CLI/package to interface with that API which sounded interesting, but I already use a hotkey to dictate text on my Mac via the OS.
• primaprashant
  Pretty cool. Added to this awesome-style GitHub repo I maintain containing all the best open-source voice typing tools:https://github.com/primaprashant/awesome-voice-typing
• Menu

  prabhanjana_c
  Great, just experimenting to see which is better voice apps to use for my Claude Code cli, on my Mac. for now settled with /voice command. will try Yap. It will be good to have an option to add custom voice commands, let say I want to open an app, or go to folder, that can be plugged, apart from transcription. Not sure if that is deviation, for Yap, love to have that kind of feature.
• jorisw
  Strangely, on my macOS 27 Beta build 26A5388g, nothing happens after I finish speaking. No input is transcribed or pasted and nothing is shown in the history.I do see the input being listed to — there's an audio graph animated as I speak (~US English), though it appears to be late in picking up my speech. Only my second "test?" is represented in the graph as it moves leftwards.I went through all the permissions, they show as checked.I also had a crash once, I've submitted the crash report.Using the DMG from GitHub.
• Menu

  jorisw
  Couple of suggestions/remarks:- Remove the presence of the Dock icon. Yap is the kind of app you just want as a menu bar utility. Like Whisper.- Add a "Settings..." menu item to the main Yap menu with `Command-,` as a shortcut. This will align it with other apps.- I couldn't enter F13 as a shortcut.- I saw there's a transcript history of input. I kind of don't want that to be there. I believe input should be ephemeral and not logged.
• d3k
  Seems nice! I have been using Handy https://handy.computer/ for a while and I am happy with it (using Parakeet), this seems quite similar in terms of features, except that is uses Apple's APIs.
• anon
  undefined
• Menu

  hbn
  I thought I was familiar with this project but I think it’s unrelated to this one I remembered from last year? Same name and also more or less an app layer for the new speech to text APIs introduced in OS 26.https://github.com/finnvoor/yap
• Menu

  __erik
  This is super cool! The brew install path in the readme doesn't seem to workremote: Repository not found. fatal: repository 'https://github.com/frigadehq/homebrew-tap/' not found
• Menu

  echoscarrie
  On-device speech recognition on macOS is such a game changer for privacy and speed. Excited to test this out!
• Menu

  eric_khun
  link to the benchmark against parakeet TDT v2 (the one im using now with spokenly) : https://get-inscribe.com/blog/parakeet-moss-apple-speech-ben...NVIDIA Parakeet TDT v2 still best, but look like apple is not far behind.i'd be happy to switch to yours if you add parakeet support, but that ight defy the purpose of the repo
• wayknow
  [flagged]
• umang_01
  [dead]