Full interactive Voice mode for Claude Code, Codex CLI, Antigravity, and Pi on Apple Silicon. Talk to your AI, hear it talk back — all running locally on your Mac. Three voice input modes, voice personas, Auto-Focus & easy setup. Open Source.
Build from source or DMG, do not pay the 99/year so you would have to allow it to run.
The command to bypass Gatekeeper for the DMG: xattr -cr /Applications/OpenWhisperer.app
If you want to do it on the DMG itself before opening: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ~/Downloads/OpenWhisperer-1.6.0.dmg
You use your coding agent — Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, or Pi — normally. After a turn you dictated by voice, the AI's reply is automatically spoken aloud through your Mac's speakers using a local TTS model, in a persona that matches your chosen voice (you can also set replies to always speak — see Response mode). Three voice input modes: Press-to-Talk (press hotkey to start/stop), Hold-to-Talk (hold hotkey to record, release to transcribe), or Hands-Free (say "initiate" to start recording, 3s silence auto-transcribes, say "hold on" to interrupt TTS).
Everything runs on your Mac — no cloud APIs, no data leaves your machine.
- Two more agents — Antigravity & Pi — spoken replies now work beyond Claude Code and Codex in the Antigravity CLI (
agy) and Pi. Pick your agent in the Setup card and Auto-Apply wires it up: Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity get a hook plus aspeaktool; Pi gets a drop-in extension. - Voice personas — pick a voice with a national accent and the reply is written to match its character: the British voice turns dry and deadpan, the Italian voice warm and expressive, the Japanese voice courteous and understated, and so on across nine accents. It colors tone only — it never changes the facts.
- Mid-turn speaking — replies are spoken through an in-app
speaktool the agent calls, so speech can start mid-turn instead of only after the whole reply lands. (Pi uses an equivalent extension.) - Adjustable speaking speed — a Speed slider in Voice Settings sets how fast replies are spoken (0.7×–1.5×, default 1.1×). Per-project override via
OW_TTS_SPEED. - Simpler Response modes — the little-used "when Text" option is gone; Response is now when Voice (dictated turns only, the default) or Always.
- Steadier voice handling — an invalid voice name from the model is ignored (it falls back to your selected voice) instead of erroring, and the transcription overlay now takes the first click even when the app is in the background — click any line to copy it.
Earlier releases — 1.5.x (native rewrite, streaming TTS, app-focus automation, first-run UX)
- Will-speak indicator — the menubar icon turns into a speaker (and the status pill reads Standby · will speak) whenever your next dictated turn's reply is set to be spoken, so a turn that silently won't speak (you edited the prompt, or dictated twice into one input) no longer looks like a bug. It only lights up when you dictate into a terminal or editor — dictating into WhatsApp, Safari, or Mail leaves it dark.
- Overlay transcription history — the floating overlay's transcript pane now shows each dictation as it happens (it had been silently empty since the native rewrite, watching a log the old Python server used to write).
- First-run download progress — the menu shows a live percentage while the speech model downloads, then a clear "compiling for the Neural Engine" message. If a model fails to load, a banner explains why with Retry and Copy Diagnostics buttons.
- Copy Diagnostics — a button in Server & Logs copies a support-ready report (app/macOS versions, permission states, model/cache status, free disk space, recent log lines) to the clipboard.
- More reliable Codex replies — spoken replies on Codex CLI are now matched to your dictated turn by content, so a parallel or typed turn can't steal or silence the reply you meant to hear.
- Voice-download hardening — alternative Kokoro voices (Bella, Michael, Siwis, …) reject a bad server response instead of caching an error page in place of the voice.
- Auto-focus any installed app — the Automation dropdown now offers a searchable list of every app installed on your Mac (Word, WhatsApp, Slack, …), alongside the curated dev/terminal favorites and a Custom entry. Search it by name and pin dictation to whichever app you like.
- Snappier menu — fixed a 3–4 second freeze when opening the menubar popover. A synchronous "launch at login" status check (an XPC call to
launchservicesd) was blocking the main thread on every open; it now runs off-main. - Response mode — a new Response control in Voice Settings (beside Style) chooses when replies are spoken: when Voice (dictated turns only — the default, unchanged) or Always. Per-project override via
OW_TTS_RESPONSE. - Automation polish — "with return" is grouped under auto-focus, and the behavior hint now reflects your exact auto-focus / with-return / auto-submit combination.
- In-app help — a hover ⓘ on every section explains what it does, and the Hook setup instructions are corrected to document both hooks (Stop + UserPromptSubmit).
- Menu tidy — the auto-focus card is now App Focus Automation, the platform/setup card is Setup TTS for (with Volume tucked inside), and all section titles share one consistent weight.
- Fully native, no Python — speech-to-text (WhisperKit) and text-to-speech (FluidAudio Kokoro) run in-process on the Apple Neural Engine. The Python server, virtualenv, and
setup.share gone, so install is just "drag to Applications," cold start is faster, and a whole class of dependency-drift failures disappears. - In-app streaming playback + instant barge-in — replies start speaking after the first sentence and play gaplessly; saying "hold on" (or starting a new turn) stops audio and cancels in-flight synthesis in-process, freeing the Neural Engine immediately.
- Tagless voice mode — no more
[VOICE:]tag inCLAUDE.md. The app fingerprints each dictation and aUserPromptSubmithook routes the spoken reply to the session you actually dictated into; only dictated turns are spoken. - Warm redesign — the menubar and transcription overlay now match openwhisperer.com: a warm cream/gold palette with a Fraunces serif wordmark, in full light and dark mode.
- WhisperKit 1.0 — the speech-to-text engine is updated to the 1.0 stable release.
- Reliability hardening — generation-guarded TTS cancellation, a request body-size cap and surfaced bind-failure on the loopback TTS server, the "Speaking…" lock now clears if the output device drops mid-reply, and a uniform voice-turn freshness window so dictating then pausing before submit still speaks.
- Garbled-speech fix on Apple Silicon — on some chips (notably M3 / macOS 15) a strided CoreML array was mis-read, producing fluent-but-wrong, "foreign-sounding" speech regardless of the text; updated to the upstream fix so synthesis is correct across Apple Silicon generations.
- Delete downloaded models — a maintenance button in Server & Logs clears the STT/TTS model caches after a confirmation that shows how much space it frees; the models re-download automatically on next use.
Download OpenWhisperer-1.6.0.dmg — drag to Applications and launch.
On first launch, the app:
- Downloads the Whisper (speech-to-text) and Kokoro (text-to-speech) CoreML models
- Loads both models on the Apple Neural Engine
- Starts the in-app TTS server automatically (loopback only, port 8000)
While that one-time download and Neural-Engine compile runs, the menu shows live progress so you know it isn't stuck (the overlay is signal-only — just a waveform and status dot):
The menubar icon gives you:
- Start/Stop/Restart server with configurable port
- Push-to-Talk — configurable hotkey (Ctrl, fn, Option, Cmd) to record
- Language selector — set STT language to avoid hallucinations (auto-detect plus 17 languages)
- Voice picker — choose from six Kokoro voices across English (Heart, Bella, Michael), French (Siwis), and Italian (Sara, Nicola) (no server restart needed)
- Style — how verbose the spoken summary is: Terse, Normal (default), Rich, or Full (speaks the entire reply)
- Response — when replies are spoken: when Voice (dictated turns only, the default) or Always
- Volume — Low, Medium (default), or High output volume (in the Setup TTS for card)
- Start on startup — optional login item to launch automatically when you log in
- App Focus Automation — Auto-Focus and Auto-Submit (requires Accessibility permission)
- Platform selector — switch between Claude Code and Codex CLI (auto-configures hooks)
- Auto-Apply — one-click setup for the hooks (adapts to selected platform)
- Accessibility prompt — asks for permission on first launch with live granted/not-granted status
- Diagnostic checklist — shows hook and TTS status at a glance
- Transcription overlay — floating window showing live waveform and recent transcriptions
- Events log — diagnostic log for troubleshooting paste and transcription issues
- TTS server log (the in-app native TTS server)
After setup, use the menubar buttons for configuration instructions.
Three modes for speech-to-text, all using your local Whisper model. Transcribed text is typed directly into whatever app you have focused.
- Hold Ctrl — recording starts immediately
- Speak your message
- Release Ctrl — audio is transcribed and inserted
- Press Ctrl — recording starts (red indicator)
- Speak your message
- Press Ctrl again — audio is sent to Whisper for transcription
- Text is inserted via Accessibility (native apps) or CGEvent Unicode typing (all others) — clipboard is never touched
No button press needed. Uses on-device keyword detection (Apple Speech framework).
- say "initiate" — recording starts (cyan → red indicator)
- speak your message
- 3 seconds of silence — audio is auto-transcribed and inserted
- returns to listening for "initiate" again
- say "hold on" during TTS playback — interrupts audio and starts recording
Tip: "Hold on" barge-in works best with headphones — without them the mic may pick up the TTS audio instead of your voice.
- Microphone permission — macOS will prompt on first use
- Accessibility permission — required for typing text into other apps. Grant in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility
Note: After rebuilding from source, you must remove and re-add the app in Accessibility settings (macOS caches the code signature).
Both features are in the App Focus Automation section of the menubar and require Accessibility permission (macOS will prompt you on first use).
Enable Auto-Focus to automatically bring a specific app to the front when you finish speaking. The app picker is searchable: type a name to filter across every app installed on your Mac (Word, WhatsApp, Slack, …), plus a curated Favorites section of dev/terminal apps (VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Xcode, Sublime Text, Nova, Fleet, Claude, Terminal, iTerm2, Warp, Alacritty, Ghostty), plus a Custom… entry to type any app name. Uses native NSRunningApplication.activate() — no System Events permission needed.
Enable Auto-Submit to automatically submit after every transcription — no trigger word needed. The transcribed text is typed and Enter is pressed.
Barge-in: Any currently playing TTS audio is automatically interrupted when you start recording (press Ctrl) or when Auto-Submit triggers, so you can speak without waiting for the AI to finish talking.
If you prefer not to grant Accessibility permission, press fn fn to use built-in macOS dictation. Less accurate for technical terms, but works instantly with zero setup.
There's no special tag to add — voice mode works automatically. The app and its hooks coordinate so that only voice-dictated turns are spoken; turns you type stay silent:
- When you dictate, the app records a fingerprint of the text it inserted.
- The UserPromptSubmit hook recognizes that turn as a voice turn and quietly nudges the model to open its reply with a short summary that stands alone.
- The Stop hook takes the first paragraph of the reply, strips markdown (capped at ~600 characters), and speaks it through the local Kokoro TTS model.
- Screen: you see the full detailed response
- Speakers: you hear the spoken opening summary
This "dictated turns only" behavior is the default. The Response control in Voice Settings changes when replies are spoken: when Voice (dictated turns only — the default) or Always (every turn). Per-project override via OW_TTS_RESPONSE.
Choose how verbose that opening summary should be (set in the menubar under Style, the left dropdown of the Voice Settings Response row):
| Level | Spoken summary |
|---|---|
| Terse | One short sentence — just the key outcome |
| Normal | One plain sentence (default) |
| Rich | A sentence or two of summary |
| Full | The entire reply, read as natural spoken prose (code/paths/tables described, not read literally) |
Most settings are configured from the menubar (voice, volume, language, hotkey, style, response mode) and stored under ~/Library/Application Support/OpenWhisperer. The hooks and speak.sh also honor a few environment variables:
| Variable | Default | Used by | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
TTS_VOICE |
af_heart |
hooks, speak.sh |
Kokoro voice name (the menubar voice picker overrides this) |
TTS_PLAY_URL |
http://localhost:8000/v1/audio/play |
hooks | In-app streaming-playback endpoint (loopback only) |
TTS_URL |
http://localhost:8000/v1/audio/speech |
speak.sh |
Blocking synthesize-to-WAV endpoint |
TTS_VOLUME |
1 |
speak.sh |
Playback volume (the in-app player uses the menubar volume setting instead) |
OW_TTS_STYLE |
menubar Style | hooks | Per-project spoken-summary style (terse/normal/rich/full); overrides the global tts_style |
OW_TTS_VOICE |
menubar voice | hooks | Per-project Kokoro voice; overrides the global tts_voice |
OW_TTS_RESPONSE |
menubar Response | hooks | Per-project response mode (voice/always); overrides the global tts_response_mode |
Tip: Setting a specific language (e.g. English) instead of auto-detect prevents Whisper from hallucinating text in other languages during silence or background noise.
No audio after response:
- Check the TTS server is running:
curl http://localhost:8000/v1/models - Test TTS directly:
echo "hello" | ./scripts/speak.sh - Check the hook path in
settings.jsonis correct and absolute - Remember only dictated turns are spoken — typed prompts stay silent by design
Push-to-talk not typing text:
- Check Accessibility permission is granted in System Settings
- If rebuilt from source, remove and re-add the app in Accessibility settings (macOS caches the code signature)
- Check the Events Log in the menubar for diagnostic details
Tip: You can ask your AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) to run these steps for you. Just paste the section below into your AI chat.
- Mac with Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4), macOS 14 or later
- Xcode Command Line Tools (
xcode-select --install) — providesswift - Claude Code or Codex CLI
- jq — only needed to run the hooks straight from the source tree (the built
.appbundles its own copy). Install with one of:# Option A: Direct download (no package manager needed) curl -L -o /usr/local/bin/jq https://github.com/jqlang/jq/releases/download/jq-1.7.1/jq-macos-arm64 && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/jq # Option B: Homebrew (if you have it) brew install jq
There is no Python, virtualenv, or pip/uv step — speech-to-text and text-to-speech are native Swift (WhisperKit + FluidAudio) and run in-process on the Apple Neural Engine.
git clone https://github.com/PerIPan/OpenWhisperer.git
cd OpenWhisperer/app
chmod +x build-dmg.sh
./build-dmg.shThis produces OpenWhisperer.app and OpenWhisperer-1.6.0.dmg in app/.build/. Launch the app — on first launch it downloads the Whisper and Kokoro models, then starts the in-app TTS server on localhost:8000 automatically. (For a plain debug build during development, run swift build from app/.)
The easiest path is the menubar's Auto-Apply button, which writes the right hooks for the selected platform (Claude Code or Codex CLI). To do it by hand for Claude Code, add this to ~/.claude/settings.json (or a project's .claude/settings.json):
{
"hooks": {
"Stop": [
{ "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "/absolute/path/to/OpenWhisperer/hooks/tts-hook.sh", "timeout": 60 } ] }
],
"UserPromptSubmit": [
{ "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "/absolute/path/to/OpenWhisperer/hooks/voice-context.sh", "timeout": 60 } ] }
]
}
}Replace /absolute/path/to/OpenWhisperer with where you cloned the repo. The UserPromptSubmit hook detects voice turns; the Stop hook speaks the reply. That's all — no CLAUDE.md or [VOICE:] tag is required.
For testing or CI you can run just the native TTS server, no GUI:
cd app
swift run OpenWhisperer --serve-tts # serves http://localhost:8000 (set TTS_PORT to change)OpenWhisperer/
├── CLAUDE.md # Guidance for AI assistants working on this repo
├── hooks/
│ ├── tts-hook.sh # Claude Code Stop hook — speaks the reply's first paragraph
│ ├── voice-context.sh # Claude Code UserPromptSubmit hook — voice-turn detection
│ ├── codex-tts-hook.sh # Codex CLI notify hook
│ └── speakable-text.sh # Shared spoken-text extractor
├── scripts/
│ └── speak.sh # Standalone TTS utility (pipe text to hear it)
└── app/ # macOS menubar app (Swift Package)
├── Package.swift
├── Sources/
│ ├── OpenWhisperer/ # App + native STT (WhisperKit) + native TTS (FluidAudio)
│ └── OpenWhispererKit/ # Pure, unit-tested logic
├── Tests/
├── Resources/
└── build-dmg.sh # Build the .app + .dmg
Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests. Whether it's bug fixes, new features, documentation improvements, or voice model suggestions — all contributions are appreciated.
The native rewrite at the heart of this app — replacing the out-of-process Python server with fully in-process Swift speech-to-text (WhisperKit) and text-to-speech (FluidAudio Kokoro), in-process streaming playback and barge-in, and the tagless voice-turn handshake — was contributed by Hakan Ensari (fork). It removed the Python/venv stack entirely and made the app notarizable. Thank you!
- WhisperKit — on-device speech-to-text (CoreML / Apple Neural Engine)
- FluidAudio — on-device Kokoro text-to-speech (CoreML / Apple Neural Engine)
- Kokoro — TTS model
- jq — JSON processor (used by the hooks)
- Claude Code — Anthropic's CLI
- Codex CLI — OpenAI's CLI agent
MIT