Guy I was chatting with at a meeting recently told me about this app. https://handy.computer/
I’ve been searching for a good offline voice input app that I can use on my Librem5 in lieu of the touchscreen keyboard, and this ticks all the boxes.
From the web site:
About Handy
I built Handy because I broke a finger, was put into a cast and as a result my hand was out of commision. I tried some of the existing speech-to-text apps but none were open source and extensible. So Handy was made to fill this gap.
It’s probably the most simple speech to text app, it’s only function is to put whatever you say into a text box. Press and hold a keyboard shortcut, speak, and release. Your words appear wherever you were typing. It runs completely offline using Whisper, works across platforms, and doesn’t require subscriptions or cloud services.
Project Goals
Handy isn’t trying to be the best speech-to-text app. It’s trying to be the most forkable one.
Handy is a starting point for when you need accessibility features, want to experiment with voice computing, or just prefer tools you can actually own and modify. The project is designed to be tiny and extensible. It is opinionated and you might have feature requests that may not make it into the main project, but you are more than welcome to implement them yourself. And with the help of Claude Code and agentic programming tools, you might just be able to without any programming experience.
Take it, fork it, modify it, break it, fix it. Build something amazing and share it to everyone.
Under the Hood
- Press a shortcut to start/stop recording (or use push-to-talk mode)
- Silence is removed via VAD filter (silero)
- Transcribes your speech using your choice of Whisper or Parakeet models.
- Pastes the text directly into whatever app you’re using
- Runs entirely on your machine with GPU acceleration when available
- Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux