Big fan of handy and it’s cross platform as well. Parakeet V3 gives the best experience with very fast and accurate-enough transcriptions when talking to AIs that can read between the lines. It does have stuttering issues though. My primary use of these is when talking to coding agents.

But a few weeks ago someone on HN pointed me to Hex, which also supports Parakeet-V3 , and incredibly enough, is even faster than Handy because it’s a native MacOS-only app that leverages CoreML/Neural Engine for extremely quick transcriptions. Long ramblings transcribed in under a second!

It’s now my favorite fully local STT for MacOS:

https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex

I just learned about Handy in this thread and it looks great!

I think the biggest difference between FreeFlow and Handy is that FreeFlow implements what Monologue calls "deep context", where it post-processes the raw transcription with context from your currently open window.

This fixes misspelled names if you're replying to an email / makes sure technical terms are spelled right / etc.

The original hope for FreeFlow was for it to use all local models like Handy does, but with the post-processing step the pipeline took 5-10 seconds instead of <1 second with Groq.

I didn't try Handy but been using Whisper-Key its super simple get out of your way all local single file executable (portable so zero install too) -- thats for Windows idk about the Mac version

[1] https://github.com/PinW/whisper-key-local

Not sure if it's just me but Handy crashes on my Arch setup. Never mind which version I run. Could be something with Wayland or Pipewire but didn't see anything obvious in the logs.

Handy's great! I find the latency to be just a bit too much for my taste. Like half the people on this thread, built my own but with a bit more emphasis on speed

https://usetalkie.com

Thanks for the recommendation! I picked the smallest model (Moonshine Base @ 58MB), and it works great for transcribing English.

Surprisingly, it produced a better output (at least I liked its version) than the recommended but heavy model (Parakeet V3 @ 478 MB).

Handy rocks. I recently had minor surgery on my shoulder that required me to be in a sling for about a month, and I thought I'd give Handy a try for dictating notes and so on. It works phenomenally well for most text-to-speech use cases - homonyms included.

Handy is genuinely great and it supports Parakeet V3. It’s starting to change how I "type" on my computer.

Yes, I also use Handy. It supports local transcription via Nvidia Parakeet TDT2, which is extremely fast and accurate. I also use gemini 2.5 flash lite for post-processing via the free AI studio API (post-processing is optional and can also use a locally-hosted LM).

Handy is nothing short of fantastic, really brilliant when combined with Parakeet v2!

I use handy as well, and love it.