Show HN: Ghost Pepper — Fully Local Hold-to-Talk Speech-to-Text for macOS Hits 393 Points

Hacker News·medium signal

Ghost Pepper, a macOS menu bar app providing hold-to-talk speech-to-text running entirely on Apple Silicon, hit 393 points and 178 comments on HN. It uses WhisperKit (~466MB) for transcription and Qwen 2.5 (~3GB) for intelligent text cleanup — no cloud APIs, no data leaves the machine, no logging to disk. Hold Control to record, release to transcribe and paste. Built by Matt Hartman, it represents the maturing local-AI-tool ecosystem on Apple hardware.