Whispering by Epicenter recently launched!

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^{"Own your data. Use any model you want. Free and open source.❤️"}

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Founded by Braden Wong

Hey everyone! 👋 Meet Braden, he's excited to introduce Whispering—a fully open-source, local-first speech-to-text app, and the first app in the Epicenter ecosystem. You can give it a star, install it here, and start using it today.

Braden uses Whispering multiple hours daily for voice coding, writing, and thinking out loud. He churned from Wispr Flow and Superwhisper after he built it.

The Whisper founder thinks the ergonomics are quite delightful, and hopes you will too!

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Voice coding workflow

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The Problem

You use a transcription app, but you have no idea what happens to your data.

They’re not open-source. They might call themselves “local” or say “inference stays on device”—but you still can’t see the code. It’s a black box, and for all you know, you’re the product.

Your voice recordings might be sitting on their servers and sold to other providers. You're locked into their ecosystem. When they pivot, get acquired, or shut down, your workflow will break.

Many “AI transcription” startups are just API or local inference wrappers with subscription pricing. You speak into their app, they send your audio to a transcription API like Whisper, then charge you monthly for what you could run yourself. Some run locally, but none Braden found were open-source with the UX he needed.

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The Solution

Truly free and open-source transcription software that matches (or surpasses) the ergonomics of paid, closed-software alternatives. The founder thinks Whispering is now at that stage.

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What makes Whispering different:

There are many other applications in the transcription landscape. Whispering offers some notable features:

• Hands-free, voice-activated dictation: One of our most ergonomic features so far. Press once to start the session, and it will automatically start and stop as you speak. No button-holding or toggling nonsense. Perfect for dictating when your hands are full.
• Custom AI transformations with any prompt, any model: Design custom transformations that chain multiple AI models to fix grammar, translate, or refactor your transcribed text.
• Unbeatable price: Nothing beats free. If you bring an API key from Groq Cloud, you’ll get nearly instantaneous transcription at $0.04/hour plus a generous free tier. And of course, if you run locally with Speeches, it’s completely free. Whispering hopes to expand its models soon.
• Open-source: MIT licensed. Fork it, examine it, roast it. At Whispering, they pride themselves in their code quality.
• Everything is local-first: In Whispering, everything is local-first. Recordings are stored in IndexedDB, and settings are stored in local storage. Built with Svelte 5 and Tauri, and it's tiny (~22MB) and fast.

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Real Daily Usage

• The founder talking to Claude in his room (3-4 hrs/day): Braden uses dictation to prompt Claude Code significantly faster than typing. He has a custom post-processing transformation set up so that every text blob that he dictates is passed through a Gemini 2.5 Flash prompt, making the output more Claude-Code-friendly (bullet points, etc.). Once done, he pastes into Claude Code.
• While carrying pizza boxes back from the Y Combinator office: Braden's hands are full, so he’ll open the web app on his phone, turn on voice activated dictation, and then start yapping as thoughts come up. The words are waiting when he gets back to his room.
• Other custom transformations: Braden has a common writing workflow of speech → Transcribe (Groq) → Fix Grammar (Claude 4 Sonnet) → Format (Gemini 2.5 Flash).

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Why This Matters

Fundamental tools shouldn’t require trusting a black box. And they shouldn’t charge you rent for something you could run yourself.

At Whispering, they believe productivity apps should be open-source and transparent with your data, and they want to destroy business models with open-source alternatives.

These alternatives will need to match Whispering feature-by-feature, have a great UX, and eventually, be built on top of their shared memory layer.

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Where This Is Going

Whispering is the first app in the Epicenter ecosystem: local-first, open-source tools built on top of a shared memory of plain text and SQLite. They hope to replace siloed, data-driven tools with local-first alternatives that share a single, user-owned memory layer.

They also hope to support many more offline models over time, giving you maximum flexibility in how and where your data is processed.

They’re not stopping at transcription. While most transcription apps tinker with static dictionaries or custom word lists, the eventual goal with Epicenter is to leverage that shared memory. They could connect transcription to everything you think, write, and build, all within a trustworthy, local-first environment.

Whispering would pick up your common phrases, technical terms, and more. Over time, you create custom transformation pipelines that adapt to your writing style, your voice, and your world.

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Try it, and let the Epicenter team know what’s up. They hope Whispering becomes a part of your workflow!

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Full Setup Guide

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Learn More

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^{🌐 Visit epicenter.so to learn more.}

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