Ghost Pepper

About

Ghost Pepper is a menu bar app for macOS that turns your voice into text without sending anything to the cloud. Hold the Control key, speak, release, and your words are transcribed and pasted into whatever text field you are using. It also records meetings and produces notes, a transcript and a summary saved as Markdown. It is for writers, developers, and anyone who dictates a lot but does not want their audio leaving their computer. The app was built by Matt Hartman and released as open source in 2026, with the cheeky pitch that it is spicy to offer for free something other companies have raised millions to build. It quickly reached the front page of Hacker News and has gathered thousands of GitHub stars. Every model runs locally on Apple Silicon: speech recognition through WhisperKit, FluidAudio and MLX Audio, and a small Qwen language model that tidies up filler words and self-corrections. The README even includes a privacy audit you can re-run yourself. Highlights: • Hold Control to talk, release to transcribe and paste into any app • Meeting recording with transcript, notes and AI summary saved as Markdown files • Choice of local speech models, from Whisper tiny and small to Parakeet and Qwen3-ASR for 50+ languages • Low-latency streaming transcription options via Nemotron models • Local LLM cleanup that removes filler words, with an editable cleanup prompt • Lives in the menu bar, launches at login, with microphone selection and feature toggles • No telemetry SDKs; optional cloud integrations are off by default and need your own keys Ghost Pepper is free, and the README states it is open source under the MIT licence. It requires macOS 14 or later on an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer); some multilingual models need macOS 15. Models download once from Hugging Face and are cached locally.

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