openwhispr

OpenWhispr is voice-to-text for your desktop. Hit a hotkey, talk, and it types into whatever app you're in, and it'll transcribe meetings with speaker labels too. The transcription runs on local models (Whisper or NVIDIA's Parakeet) with no API keys required, so your audio never has to leave your machine. MIT, free, cross-platform.

Install is trivial, there are prebuilt installers for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Local models download on first use, and if you've got a GPU it'll use Metal, CUDA, or Vulkan to speed things up, but CPU works fine. You can optionally bring your own cloud LLM keys for cleanup, but you don't need to.

Everything you need for personal dictation is free and local. There's a separate hosted OpenWhispr Cloud for teams: free up to 2,000 words a week, $6.67/user/mo for Pro, $16.67/user/mo for Business with speaker labels and agent mode. Solo users should just run the free desktop app and skip the cloud entirely. Teams that want shared, unlimited transcription and sync are who the paid tiers are for. This is a real alternative to Otter and Rev if you value keeping audio local.

The catch is the usual local-versus-cloud tradeoff. The free local app is good, but the polished team features, unlimited cloud transcription, sync, speaker labels at scale, sit behind the subscription, and the free cloud tier's 2,000-words-a-week cap is tight. For one person it's all upside. For a team, price the Business tier against what you're paying Otter now.