Phantom Voice: A One-Time-Purchase, On-Device Dictation App for Mac

Most Mac dictation apps ask for a monthly fee and a cloud connection before they'll transcribe a single sentence. Phantom Voice, a new Product Hunt launch from solo developer Willis Liao, takes the opposite position: it's a $10 one-time-purchase, on-device dictation app for Mac that never sends audio anywhere. Hold the fn key, speak, release, and the transcribed text appears wherever the cursor already is, whether that's a code editor, a terminal, or a Slack message.

What Phantom Voice actually does

The mechanic is push-to-talk, not always-listening. There's no separate recording window to switch to and no waiting for a connection to establish. Press and hold fn, say what needs saying, let go, and the finished text drops into the active app. Transcription runs locally through whisper.cpp with Metal acceleration, so the audio never leaves the machine, not even for processing. That's a real distinction from cloud-based dictation tools, where speech is sent to a remote server and the user has to trust a privacy policy rather than verify the claim directly.

Users can choose between four Whisper model sizes, Base, Small, Medium, or Large v3 Turbo, trading transcription speed against accuracy. Turbo ships as the default because its distilled decoder is both faster and more accurate than Medium. On an M1 MacBook Air, the developer's own posted numbers put latency at roughly half a second for a five-second phrase and about 1.2 seconds for ten seconds of speech, since decode time scales with how long someone talked rather than being a fixed cost.

An optional cleanup pass, off by default

Phantom Voice includes a second, separate feature: a local cleanup pass that strips filler words and fixes punctuation without changing what was said. It's off by default, which matters, because raw dictation and cleaned-up dictation are different products for different situations. Early feedback in the Product Hunt comments pushed the developer to tighten the rule further: cleanup is only allowed to delete known filler words and stutters and fix punctuation and capitalization, compared word-for-word against the raw transcript, with any other change discarded in favor of the original text. That keeps the cleanup pass from quietly swapping a mistranscribed technical term for a fluent-sounding wrong one, which is a real risk with any rewriting model sitting between what someone said and what lands on the page.

Pricing: one time, no subscription

This is where Phantom Voice draws its clearest line against most of the Mac dictation app category, which is built almost entirely on recurring billing. Phantom Voice is a $10 one-time purchase with no subscription, backed by a 14-day free trial that doesn't require a card. The source code is available on GitHub under an MIT license, with the name, logo, and commercial artwork excluded from that license. That's a meaningfully different posture from most commercial dictation tools, which stay closed source regardless of what they charge. Buying the app gets the built app, notarized and packaged with its cosmetic assets; the MIT-licensed repository is the same functional codebase without those branded extras, and it's public for anyone who wants to verify the on-device privacy claim directly rather than take it on faith. First launch downloads a roughly 1.5GB Whisper model file, which is a one-time cost of setup rather than a repeated one.

Who it's for, and who it's not

Phantom Voice is aimed squarely at people who already use dictation as a way to move faster than typing, particularly developers and anyone doing a lot of back-and-forth with AI chat tools, where phrasing can be loose and the model doesn't care about a stray "um." The push-to-talk model also fits people who are uneasy with always-listening assistants: a held key is an unambiguous signal that recording is happening, rather than a wake word that might or might not be listening in the background.

It is explicitly not for everyone. Phantom Voice only runs on macOS 14 or newer, and only on Apple Silicon Macs. There's no Intel Mac support, no Windows version, and no Linux version, and the app is English-only for now. Anyone on an Intel Mac or a non-Apple platform, or anyone who needs dictation in another language, will need to look elsewhere. It also requires Accessibility and Input Monitoring permissions to insert text into other apps, which is standard for this category of tool but worth knowing going in.

Current traction

As of today, Phantom Voice sits at 83 upvotes on Product Hunt and ranked #21 for its launch day, 13 days after it went live. It's Liao's first paid app, and he's been actively answering questions in the comments, including reworking the cleanup pass based on user feedback mid-launch. That's a modest number next to established dictation tools, but the product is new, the source is inspectable, and the core pitch, on-device transcription with no recurring fee, is easy to verify rather than take on faith.

Source: Phantom Voice on Product Hunt, github.com/WillisLiao/Phantom-Voice