Lotsa alternatives out there that are fully Mac native like https://voice.baselinemakes.com

fair, it isn't fully native. The dictation helper is the only native piece, the UI is a local web page. That was a deliberate tradeoff to get Qwen3-ASR running through MLX on macOS 14+ rather than wait on a Swift port. Better Voice looks good. Worth noting it's closed source and needs macOS 26, where mine is Apache-2.0 and runs on 14. Different bets.

This does the same thing with Apple models or Ollama models. Also has meeting transcription: https://voice.baselinemakes.com

It’s a great API. I use it in my app and it’s feels so much more accurate.

This is how i am developing keptrecipes.com. Been a pleasure this way TBH.

Repo here: https://github.com/drkpxl/better-voice I cleaned it up a bunch as I did like 30 iterations of this before I was happy with it.

Hi I built this things for myself because I didn't want to have both a dictation app and a meeting app I had to pay for. After sharing it with some friends they said I should put it out there since it's free and solves problem lotsa paid apps do. There are certainly some rough edges but would love your thoughts.

Same, I was just fighting it as it accused me over and over again of Ctrl+Cing a process that clearly errored out. 3 turns for it to find why the shell script actually crashed.

Wait till you hear about about CMS migrations I did before AI existed.

I grew up there. I was maybe 14 so I have some memory of how worked up the community was. I remember people talking about building a bridge to CT since there would be no other way to get people off the island. It was such a fierce time then, nothing compared to nowadays about seemingly anything though.

They should still build that bridge; it's funny to drive on 135 and just see the highway come to an end, but I'm not sure it would have survived even with the Long Island Sound link.

Can you say a bit more about this? The bad tool calling has made me give up on using Gemma for my Hermes and a personal recipe site. I have only downloaded from Ollama.

Ollama is not recommended [0], use llama.cpp or more specifically Unsloth Studio which wraps llama.cpp and which has an API mode you can use to hook into Hermes or another agent. Unsloth make both the Studio and the quants which fix various issues with many models [1] as well as implementing new features like MTP and QAT support much sooner than other teams. In general you should read r/LocalLLaMa as it has a lot of updates regarding local models as the field moves fast.

[0] https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/

[1] https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth/discussions/4921