I got tired of paying $15/mo to talk to my computer, so I built my own (free + open source)

I use voice dictation every single day. Wispr Flow is great, but $15/month adds up, and I kept thinking: everything it does could run locally on my Mac.

So this week I built it. Meet OpenFlow. 🎙️

Hold a key, talk, release, and your words appear wherever your cursor is. Any app. Editors, Slack, the browser, your terminal.

The best part: it runs 100% on your Mac. No cloud. No subscription. No account. Your voice never leaves your machine.

What's under the hood:

🔹 NVIDIA's Parakeet model transcribes at 35x realtime (it even spells "kubectl" correctly)

🔹 Whisper handles other languages

🔹 Apple Intelligence cleans up your "ums" and false starts, fully on device

🔹 Custom dictionary, searchable history, lives in your menu bar

Here's the thing I want you to take away: I built the entire app with Claude Code. Native Swift, two speech engines, an on-device cleanup pipeline, a landing page, and it even generated its own app icon. A year ago this would have been a month of work with a Swift developer. This week it was a weekend.

It's free and open source (MIT), so you can download it, read every line, or fork it:

🌐 Website: robj1925.github.io/open-flow

💻 Code: github.com/Robj1925/open-flow

I'll be posting a breakdown of how I built it if there's interest.

Question for you: if typing was never the bottleneck, what would you build or ship faster? Drop it below. 👇

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I got tired of paying $15/mo to talk to my computer, so I built my own (free + open source)