I record a lot, meetings, lectures, brain dumps at 2am, and I didn't trust any of the existing options with my voice. Otter, Granola, Fireflies.
So I built OpenEar.
Hit Control-R. Talk for as long as you want. Each recording becomes a matte-black vinyl with a hand-set label in your library. Click any word in the
transcript and the audio jumps there, like dragging a needle to a groove. You can drag the disc itself like a DJ scratch to scrub.
It also does push-to-talk dictation into any text field on your Mac. Hold a hotkey, talk, words land wherever your cursor is. Live transcript shows in the notch like Dynamic
Island while you hold the key. Local LLM cleans up grammar and punctuation in real time.
Smart actions on every transcript: summary, action items, ask questions of the recording, rewrite as email. All on-device. Custom vocab support so it gets your colleagues' names right. iCloud sync uses your iCloud.
Stack: WhisperKit for transcription, Gemma 4 (4-bit MLX) for the LLM stuff. ~400ms end-to-end on M2 Air. Apple Silicon only. Code-signed and notarized DMG.
Pricing: 2-day free trial, no card needed. $29 one-time for the first 500 buyers . no subscription
Curious what you guys use for recording right now . happy to take feedback or answer any questions