Handy

Press a shortcut, speak, release, and the words appear in the text field you were already typing into. Handy is a free, open source speech-to-text application that does this entirely on your own computer, so no audio is sent anywhere and no subscription stands between a person and basic accessibility tooling.

Recording can be held or toggled, with hold-only and toggle-only modes for anyone who wants one behavior. Silence is filtered by Silero voice activity detection, then transcription runs on a model of your choice, Whisper in small, medium, turbo or large sizes with GPU acceleration where available, or Parakeet V3, a CPU-optimized model with automatic language detection.

The application is a Tauri build with a clear split between its parts.

• Frontend: React and TypeScript with Tailwind CSS for the settings interface.
• Backend: Rust handles system integration, audio processing and machine learning inference.
• Speech libraries: transcribe-cpp runs the Whisper family while transcribe-rs runs Parakeet.
• System plumbing: cpal for audio input and output, rdev for global shortcuts and rubato for resampling.
• Command line flags: a running instance can toggle transcription, cancel an operation, start hidden or skip the tray icon.

Releases are published for Windows, macOS and Linux, with Homebrew cask and winget packages that the developers do not maintain themselves. First launch asks for microphone and accessibility permissions, and a debug mode is one keystroke away when something misbehaves. The project says plainly that it aims to be the most forkable speech-to-text tool rather than the best one.