MacParakeet - Free + Open-source WisprFlow alternative that runs on Mac Silicon

I'm on a journey to replacing my monthly SaaS subscriptions. First stop is WisprFlow.

So I built MacParakeet (MacOS only) as a replacement. It's free and open-source under GPL!

I mainly focused on the things that I need, which boiled down to:
- WisprFlow-like UIUX for dictation (smooth + polished)
- YouTube transcription & export to multiple formats

There are some additional features I added, like chat with youtube transcript (integration is available with local ollama or cloud vendors like openai or claude). It runs on NVIDIA's Parakeet model (0.6B-v3) via FluidAudio, which has the best performance for realtime transcription for English. 60 min of audio transcribes in <30 seconds (after the local model has been loaded the first time ofc). WER is also very low.

There are many other similar apps out there with much wider array of features, but I made this for myself and will continue iterating in the spirit of "there are many dictation/transcription apps, but this one is mine." (homage to badlogicgame's pi agent)

How it works
- Press a hotkey in any app, speak, then text gets pasted
- File transcription: drag-drop audio/video files
- Transcribe YouTube URLs via yt-dlp
- Speaker diarization - identifies who said what, with renameable labels
- AI summaries and chat - bring your own API key (OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, OpenRouter)
- Clean text pipeline - filler word removal, custom words, text snippets
- Export formats - TXT, Markdown, SRT, VTT, DOCX, PDF, JSON

Limitations:
- Apple silicon only (M1/M2/M3/M4 etc)
- Best with English - supports 25 European languages but accuracy varies; No broad multi-lingual support, so it won't transcribe korean, japanese, chinese, etc.

This app has been in production for about 3 weeks now with 300 downloads thus far. Most of the discovery coming in from organic google search. I've been continually fixing and refining. In any case, I have cancelled subscription to wisprflow (which is a great app and has served me well for many months); but local asr models (like Parakeet) and runtime (like FluidAudio) have gotten way too good to ignore.

Hope you like it - let me know!

Website - https://www.macparakeet.com/
Github - https://github.com/moona3k/macparakeet

PS. I also consume korean/chinese youtube content so I'll be adding support for qwen3-asr for transcribing asian languages in the near future.