ghost-pepper: a private on-device voice-to-text and meeting transcription tool for macOS

What it solves

Ghost Pepper is a privacy-focused voice-to-text tool for macOS that allows users to transcribe speech and record meetings without sending any audio or text data to cloud APIs. It eliminates the dependency on external servers for transcription and AI-driven text cleanup, ensuring that sensitive information remains entirely on the local machine.

How it works

The app runs open-source models locally on Apple Silicon (M1+) using WhisperKit and LLM.swift. It offers a variety of speech models (such as Whisper and Qwen3-ASR) for different languages and multilingual support, and cleanup models (Qwen 3.5) to remove filler words and handle self-corrections. Users can either hold a hotkey to transcribe and paste text into any field or use the meeting transcription feature to generate notes and summaries in Markdown format.

Who it’s for

Mac users on macOS 14.0+ with Apple Silicon who prioritize privacy and need a tool for quick voice-to-text input or meeting transcription with local AI processing.

Highlights

• 100% Local Processing: All transcription and summarization happens on-device, with no data leaving the machine.
• Global Hotkey: Hold the Control key to talk and release to paste transcribed text into any application.
• Meeting Transcription: Records calls and generates local AI summaries and transcripts saved as Markdown files.
• Smart Cleanup: Uses a local LLM to remove filler words and self-corrections from transcribed text.
• Multilingual Support: Supports over 50 languages via various local models.
• Menu Bar Integration: Operates as a menu bar app that can launch at login.