Private dictation that finds the model that hears your voice best — and never sends a byte anywhere.
🌍 hearme — one-page site & download
HearMe is a hardened, feature-extended fork of the excellent Handy by CJ Pais. Hold a hotkey anywhere on your desktop, speak, release — the transcript is typed at your cursor. Everything runs on-device.
Mainstream speech models are benchmarked on American and European voices. On West-African-accented English, the model topping the public leaderboards silently dropped 60–80% of the words in live tests, while another transcribed near-verbatim. You can't see that on a leaderboard — so HearMe measures it: the voice-setup wizard has you read three short phrases once, scores every model on your machine against your voice (word error rate + speed), and applies the winner in one click.
- Voice-setup wizard — benchmark all downloaded models on your own voice, apply the best
- Local-only by construction — cloud LLM providers are removed from the code (not just disabled) and pruned from old settings on load; update phone-home off by default
- Command mode — highlight text, hold
Ctrl+Shift+Space, say "make this more formal": a local LLM (Ollama) rewrites it in place, reading the selection via the Accessibility API - Live typing (experimental) — words appear while you speak; the cleaned text re-settles on release
- Spoken punctuation — "period" → "." deterministically, no LLM latency
- Dictionary suggestions — recurring names from your history become one-click custom words
- Per-app cleanup prompts, history search, mic-too-quiet warning, model activate toggle + launch preload, accent color, self-healing hotkey doctor
Full list: docs/FEATURES.md · release history: docs/CHANGELOG.md · design/internals: docs/ARCHITECTURE.md
macOS (Apple Silicon, the tested platform): grab the .dmg from Releases, drag to Applications. The build is unsigned: right-click → Open on first launch, then grant Microphone, Accessibility, and Input Monitoring when prompted.
Windows (beta): ..._x64-setup.exe (Intel/AMD) or ..._arm64-setup.exe (ARM). Unsigned — SmartScreen will warn: "More info" → "Run anyway".
Linux (beta): .deb, .rpm, or .AppImage from the same release, in amd64 and arm64 flavors. Wayland support is limited upstream.
Windows and Linux builds are CI-built from the same source but not yet hand-tested on real hardware — issues welcome. Building from source: docs/INSTALL.md.
lsof -i -a -p $(pgrep -x handy) # while dictating: zero rowsThe only network use is the one-time, SHA-256-pinned model download you trigger yourself.
- Forked from cjpais/Handy (MIT) — thank you for the outstanding foundation.
- Built end-to-end with Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic): research, code, adversarial reviews, docs, and the landing page.
MIT, same as upstream.