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DevWizard productmacOS 14+Developer tools

HoldTalk

Free, offline push-to-talk dictation for macOS. Hold a key, speak Bangla or English, release, and the text appears at your cursor.

View source on GitHub
Latest release
v1.1.37 Jun 2026
Language
Swift
License
MIT
Last updated
7 Jun 2026
Illustrative interface drawn from the project's features, not a screenshot.

The problem

Dictation tools usually need accounts, subscriptions or a cloud round trip, and most handle Bangla badly. We wanted dictation that stays on the machine, works in any app and copes with Bangla and English in the same session.

What we built

What we built

HoldTalk is a menu-bar app that runs OpenAI’s Whisper model locally through whisper.cpp. Hold Right Option, speak, release, and the transcript is pasted into whichever app has focus, through a clipboard swap that restores what you had copied.

  • Hold-to-talk and hands-free modes, with a floating pill that shows a live mic-level waveform and never steals focus.
  • Automatic Bangla and English detection, including a fix for Whisper’s habit of mistaking Bangla for Hindi, plus a translate mode that turns spoken Bangla into English text.
  • A warm server that preloads the model while you speak, bringing latency on an Apple M1 with 8 GB from about 17 seconds on a cold start to roughly 1.5 to 3.5 seconds.
  • The roughly 600 MB model unloads after an idle timeout, so the app idles at about 57 MB of RAM.
  • Local history with pin, copy and multi-delete. Nothing is uploaded.

How it was built

Pure Swift with an AVAudioRecorder capture path, a local whisper-server process with a one-shot whisper-cli fallback, and an installer that adds whisper-cpp through Homebrew and downloads a checksum-verified release build. The performance figures above come from the project README.

Source and releases: DevWizardHQ/HoldTalk.

Stack

  • Swift
  • whisper.cpp
  • Whisper large-v3-turbo
  • AVFoundation
  • macOS 14+

Outcome

Versioned releases on GitHub, installable with a single checksum-verified script.

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