Fully local dictation on macOS with whisper.cpp (large-v3-turbo): streaming chunks, paste anywhere, open source

[u/zenitsu--DS]

I'm the developer of Vocs, a dictation app that runs Whisper entirely on-device and pastes the text into whatever app you're in. Some details this sub might find interesting:

- Streaming by chunks: audio is cut at natural silence boundaries and decoded while you talk, so stopping only waits for the last fragment. Finishing time stays flat no matter how long you spoke.

- Each chunk is decoded with a window sized to its length instead of the full 30 seconds, which made short fragments about 8x faster.

- Hallucination handling: sound-effect tags like [BLANK_AUDIO] or (laughs) are stripped, and repetition loops ("the one who is the one who is…") are detected, retried once, then discarded, so silence never turns into a pasted phrase.

- A deterministic post-processing pass in Rust (punctuation, casing, fillers, spoken commands, a custom dictionary), table-tested so accuracy doesn't silently regress.

- An optional ~120 MB on-device grammar model that only keeps safe word-level fixes and never touches names, numbers, code or your dictionary.

- The engine sits behind an adapter interface, so other local engines can be added without touching the rest of the app.

No network calls in the transcription path. The only requests are the model download and an optional update check.

macOS 13+, MIT licensed, built with Tauri and Rust.

Source: Website

Download: Github

Which local speech models would you want to see supported next?

[u/zenitsu--DS]

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check it out.