Your voice is not
a subscription.
In the AI era, talking to your computer is a basic need — like copy and paste, like a keyboard. Basic needs should never be gated by payment. That is the whole mission, and everything else follows from it.
Talking is how humans work. Typing is the workaround.
People speak at roughly 150 words a minute and type at roughly 40. A Stanford study measured speech input at about three times the speed of typing on mobile keyboards. Voice has always been the faster interface — what was missing was software that respects you enough to run on your own machine, for free.
Pay for tokens, not permission.
Companies charge $144 a year to stand between your voice and your screen — for compute your Mac already has. We think that's backwards. Dictation in OpenVoiceFlow is free and open source, with no account or consumer subscription: Whisper runs on your machine and your audio never leaves it.
The one optional extra — AI cleanup that polishes grammar and filler words — is bring-your-own-key. Point it at OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Groq and you pay the model provider directly, in cents, for tokens you actually use. Or run Ollama and pay nobody. Your money should buy compute, not permission — go buy tokens, go build something, and keep the $144.
The best version of this app is the one that becomes unnecessary.
Our goal is not to own a market. It is for voice input this good to be a default feature of every operating system — built in, free, private — so that third-party developers no longer need to build apps like this one. Until that day, we publish the source so every privacy claim is checkable in code. A modified version that is distributed or offered over a network must publish its complete corresponding source under the same license, and the required attribution notice must be retained.
If you're a developer who believes typing shouldn't be a toll booth, this is an invitation. Try the app, file honest feedback, improve accuracy for your language — this project is built for you.
Who builds this
OpenVoiceFlow is built by Shimoverse Studios and contributors. Use is free for everyone, including at work, under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. A modified version that is distributed or offered over a network must publish complete corresponding source under the same license, and the required attribution notice must be retained. If you build on OpenVoiceFlow within the free license, keep the required notices visible, rebrand your derivative, and contact us at contact@openvoiceflow.com — we love knowing where the work travels. The name and logo are protected by a brand policy, so anything wearing the OpenVoiceFlow name keeps the promises on this website: audio on-device, no account or consumer subscription, and dictation content that never leaves your Mac. Read the privacy policy — including the one disclosed exception since v0.5.7, an opt-out anonymous usage summary. We don't sell it, and we've built the page to say exactly what it is rather than paper over it.