openwhispr

OpenWhispr is voice-to-text for your desktop. Hit a hotkey, talk, and it types into whatever app you're in. It also records and transcribes meetings, spotting Zoom, Teams and FaceTime calls on its own and labeling who said what. Transcription can run entirely on local models (Whisper, NVIDIA's Parakeet and others), so your audio never has to leave your machine. MIT licensed, free, no account needed.

Install is a prebuilt download for Mac, Windows or Linux, and it updates itself. A GPU speeds it up through Metal, CUDA or Vulkan. You can plug in your own OpenAI, Groq, Gemini, Mistral, Deepgram or AssemblyAI key for unlimited cloud transcription on the free plan. Usage analytics stay off unless you turn them on. Intel Macs miss the live speaker-ID features.

The startup behind it sells a cloud on top. Free includes 2,000 cloud words a week and 5 meeting hours a month. Pro is $8 a month ($80 a year) for unlimited cloud transcription, agent mode, sync, the iPhone app and 20 meeting hours. Business is $16 per user per month for unlimited meetings and team admin, and SSO means Enterprise. Solo: the free local app is plenty. Teams leaving Otter: price Business against your current bill.

The catch: the desktop app is open source, the cloud backend is not, so sync and the phone app can't be self-hosted. It also moves fast, with about ten releases in two months and a long issue queue, so expect the occasional rough update.