Looped Whisper (FOSS) – Voice transcription menubar app for macOS

I built a free, open-source (MIT) macOS menu-bar app that runs Whisper models locally to assist with dictation. There is also the option to use an LLM (BYOK).

You hold a global hotkey, speak, and the text gets pasted at your cursor similar to other similar/popular apps.

Some details:

- Transcription runs locally via WhisperKit (CoreML), so it works offline once the model is downloaded. BYO model — tiny through large-v3, auto-downloaded and cached. The base model has been working surprisingly well for me with gpt-5.4-mini as the transformation model. - Push-to-talk (hold) and start/stop toggle hotkeys, both configurable. - fn/Globe key supported. - Realtime mode for live captions as you speak. - Optional LLM cleanup to fix typos/punctuation — point it at Anthropic or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, key stored in the macOS Keychain. - A vocabulary feature to bias recognition toward your names, jargon, and identifiers (handy for dictating code). - This works as a menu-bar agent, no Dock icon, optional launch at login.

I built this because I wanted local dictation that I could fully own and that handled dev jargon, without a subscription.

Superwhisper/Wispr Flow is a more polished and full-featured - this is just a hackable, open source version.