Handy: A Lightweight MacWhisper Alternative for Speech-to-Text

Handy is a free, open source speech-to-text app that runs speech recognition models entirely on your machine. It does one thing: you press a keyboard shortcut, speak, and it transcribes your words directly into whatever text field you’re typing in.

Why I Switched from MacWhisper

I’d been using MacWhisper for transcription and it works well, but it tends to consume a lot of RAM. I wasn’t using most of MacWhisper’s features anyway — I just needed quick dictation into text fields. Handy does exactly that without the memory overhead.

What Makes Handy Worth Trying

Completely local and private. Everything runs on your hardware. No audio leaves your computer, no cloud API keys to manage, no subscription fees.

Multiple model options. Handy supports both OpenAI’s Whisper and NVIDIA’s Parakeet v3. Parakeet is significantly faster — roughly 10x quicker than Whisper — while delivering comparable accuracy. If you want near-instant transcription, Parakeet v3 is the one to pick.

Cross-platform. Available for Mac (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows (x64 and ARM), and Linux (AppImage, .deb, .rpm). Same workflow everywhere.

Dead simple. There’s almost nothing to configure. You get a system tray icon, a keyboard shortcut for push-to-talk (or toggle mode), and that’s it. Press the shortcut, speak, release, and your words appear in the active text field.

Free and open source. MIT licensed, hosted on GitHub with over 15k stars. Built with Tauri (Rust + React), so it’s lightweight compared to Electron-based alternatives.

Getting Started

Download the installer for your platform from handy.computer/download. On Mac, grab the .dmg for your chip (Apple Silicon or Intel). Launch it, and the Handy icon appears in your menu bar.

The default mode is push-to-talk: hold the keyboard shortcut while speaking, release to transcribe. You can switch to toggle mode in settings if you prefer pressing once to start and once to stop. The keyboard shortcut is also customizable.

If you mostly use MacWhisper for dictation and don’t need its file transcription, editing tools, or export features, Handy is a much lighter option that just handles the speech-to-text part.