Show HN: Resonant – Local-only speech-to-text for macOS (no cloud)
onresonant.comHey HN, I'm Thomas. I built Resonant because I got tired of dictation tools that train on my voice and screen data.
My dad's a doctor who dictates patient notes. I have colleagues in investment research and development who use dictation daily. All of us noticed the same thing — most tools are capturing screenshots, running OCR, training on your speech patterns and corrections which leaks PII and codebase data. Apple has long shown with Siri how gatekept voice data is. Your voice is something intimate.
Resonant does speech-to-text entirely on your Mac. Audio never leaves your machine. There is no cloud transcription, no voice data retention, no correction training.
How it works technically:
- Runs Parakeet TDT 0.6B (25 languages) or Moonshine v2 (English, 6.65% WER — lower than Whisper Large v3's 7.44%) locally via sherpa-onnx - Key-release to text-ready: ~420ms on M1 Pro - Text formatting pipeline (single-pass automata replacing 30+ regex passes) - Personal dictionary that learns your vocabulary — frequency-based, graduates a correction after 3 uses - Screen-context awareness via local OCR (Apple Vision framework) to bias transcription toward words currently on screen - ~900MB RSS steady state
On the privacy claim: I want to be precise here. Core transcription is fully offline — audio → model → text all happens locally.
The app does include optional PostHog analytics and Sentry error reporting (not on dictation content), plus an auto-updater that checks GitHub for new versions. I want to add a one-toggle "airplane mode" that disables all of these once I have more stability and beta checks in. You can verify zero outbound connections during dictation.
What's different from Willow / Superwhisper / Wispr Flow / Aqua:
- Model choice — you pick between Parakeet (25 languages) and Moonshine v2 (best English accuracy), not locked to one - A text formatter that handles 50+ rules (email formatting, list detection, ordinals, filler word removal) — not just punctuation - Personal dictionary that actually adapts to your vocabulary over time - Screen-context biasing so it gets your domain-specific terms right
Currently completely free, no word limits, no subscriptions
It's Electron, so it uses more memory than a native app (~900MB).
macOS only, Apple Silicon only for now. Windows/Linux cross-platform port is spec'd out and next on the release after testing.
I'd love your feedback on accuracy, latency, and anything that feels off. What would make this something you'd actually switch to?
Download: https://www.onresonant.com/download
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