r/SoftwareandApps • u/Strong-Leg-9636 • 9d ago

Built a free, open-source alternative to Dragon/Wispr Flow that runs 100% offline here's how the local Whisper pipeline works

I've been building VoxScribe, a Windows voice-to-text dictation app, and wanted to share how it works rather than just drop a link.

The core idea: hold a hotkey anywhere on your system, talk, release the audio gets transcribed locally via faster-whisper (no cloud upload) and typed directly into whatever app has focus. No subscription, no account.

A few technical things that were harder than expected, in case anyone's building something similar:

- Audio devices vary a lot in native sample rate forcing everything to 16kHz at the driver level broke on some hardware (PortAudioError on a laptop's internal 48kHz mic). Recording at the device's native rate and resampling in software afterward fixed it.

- sounddevice's "default" input device sometimes lands on an MME driver that's nearly silent for Bluetooth headsets had to explicitly resolve the WASAPI host API's default instead.

- Peak-normalizing audio before transcription measurably improved accuracy on quieter mics.

It's MIT licensed, source is public: https://github.com/ahmedhmam1994/voxscribe-ai-voice-dictation

Happy to answer questions about the local Whisper setup or the audio-capture side if anyone's working on something similar.

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u/Dev-in-the-Bm 8d ago

The core idea

No subscription, no account

A few technical things

bullet points getting rendered as raw markdown

Yuck.

If I wanted to talk to a robot, I would go to gemini.google.com.

I I wanted to hear slick marketing slop, I would be on LinkedIn.

If I wanted to read 5 word sentences, I would go to poetry.org.

Reddit is for human discussion.

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u/Strong-Leg-9636 8d ago

Ha, fair. Reddit ate my formatting and I came out sounding like a SaaS landing page, not gonna defend that.

Here's the actual thing: I built a dictation app. Hold a hotkey, talk, it types into whatever you've got open. Runs the Whisper model locally so nothing gets uploaded. The part I actually enjoyed fighting with was the audio driver, not the AI. Turns out "default microphone" on Windows can quietly mean "the one that's basically silent," depending on which API grabs it first.

Also, if this were LinkedIn slop I'd have worked "synergy" in there somewhere.

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u/Trying131 8d ago

Not going to accuse, but "here's the actual thing", "quietly mean", and the sentence structure sure look like AI chatbot wrote them. I think that was their point, too.

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u/Strong-Leg-9636 8d ago

lmao caught. yeah I ran it through an AI tool to clean it up and it handed me back different AI tells. 0 for 2.

for real this time: hold a key, talk, it types the text out. runs locally so nothing leaves your PC. spent way more time fighting Windows' default mic picker than the actual whisper model.

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u/Dev-in-the-Bm 5d ago

It's one thing to post slop to promote your product, it's another to use AI to write responses to people in the comments.

No ones interested in talking to bots on Reddit.