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Guides on how to use dictation on a Mac or Windows PC, free dictation tools, Wispr Flow alternatives, and using Codictate across apps, IDEs, chat, and mail.
13 posts
Wispr shipped a new speech model the day I finished testing the old one. So I ran all 8,287 recordings again.
On 17 September 2026 Wispr Flow switched to Canto, Wispr's own English speech model. I had just finished testing Flow on every English recording we have. So I tested everything again. Canto barely changed accuracy: clean English improved by 0.10 points and noisy English got 0.06 points worse. Flow did get 17 to 26 percent faster, in every language.
Emil Lykke Grann
We ran Wispr Flow on every recording we have. 8,287 of them, 19.8 hours of audio.
Our first Wispr Flow test used 400 recordings per language. This one uses all 8,287 recordings in our test set, in five languages, on one Flow version. Flow got 96.00% of words right in clean English and 77.94% in Hungarian. On the same recordings, Codictate's local models beat Flow in four of the five languages.
Emil Lykke Grann
We measured Wispr Flow in five of its 100+ languages. English scored 95.5%, Hungarian 76.7%.
We played 2,000 clips of LibriSpeech and FLEURS audio into Wispr Flow 1.6.774 through a virtual microphone, the exact same 400 clips per dataset that 18 Codictate models were scored on. Flow pooled 91.76% word accuracy, beat every on-device model we ship on Danish, and answered fastest on English.
Emil Lykke Grann
A 153 MB Danish model beats Whisper Large V3 at Danish dictation
Hviske v5 Tiny is now in Codictate. On 36 minutes of FLEURS Danish it scored 88.7% word accuracy against 84.8% for Whisper Large V3 Turbo and 80.6% for Parakeet, while running 3x faster on a third of the memory.
Emil Lykke Grann
We swapped whisper-cli for CrispASR: 1.58x faster, 24% less RAM, and 107 backends instead of one
Whisper transcription in Codictate no longer runs on whisper.cpp's own CLI. Nine speed comparisons on an M4 Max, honest accuracy numbers, and the Danish model that made the swap worth doing.
Emil Lykke Grann
Tiny vs Base: a 50-sample triage to find which Whisper models deserve a full benchmark
12 Whisper Tiny and Base variants, 50 samples each, tested through Codictate's pipeline on an M4 Max. A triage run to find which small models deserve a full benchmark.
Emil Lykke Grann
We benchmarked every model in Codictate. Here is what 4,000 transcriptions revealed.
4 speech-to-text models, 5 languages, 200 samples each, all running through Codictate's own pipeline on an M4 Max. Real numbers, real trade-offs.
Emil Lykke Grann
Wispr Flow Alternative for MacBook
Wispr Flow alternative that is free, open source, and runs on-device. Codictate gives you dictation on Mac and MacBook with no subscription.
Emil Lykke Grann
Free Dictation Tool for Mac: Dictate in Any App
Looking for a free dictation tool for Mac or MacBook? Codictate is open source, runs on-device, and pastes text into any app. No subscription, no cloud.
Emil Lykke Grann
How To Use Dictation on Your Mac
Apple's built-in Mac dictation works for a quick sentence. Codictate is a free dictation tool for Mac and MacBook with on-device AI, stream mode, translate, formatting, and 50+ languages.
Emil Lykke Grann
NVIDIA Parakeet TDT v3: dictation that stays on your Mac
Stream mode and a new on-device engine: Parakeet TDT v3 via Core ML on the Apple Neural Engine, ~25 languages, one download in Settings.
Emil Lykke Grann
Translate Mode + two days after launch
Thank you for the launch week energy we hit #27 on Product Hunt. New: speak in your language, get English text. Plus notes on Apple code signing.
Emil Lykke Grann
Any language. Any application. Anytime.
Why I built Codictate: Electrobun, a Wispr Flow trial ending, and a rule: no AI until I could dictate my prompts with my own tool.
Emil Lykke Grann