OpenLess
Open-source voice input for macOS, Windows & Linux
Hold a hotkey, speak, and watch AI-polished text stream straight to your cursor —
in the writing style you choose.
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💬 Join our Discord · QQ Group 1078960553
Sponsors
OpenLess is sustained by the generous support of its sponsors.
悠雾云数据 · Youwu Cloud Data (knin.net)
Developers
OpenLess is a cross-platform (macOS and Windows) voice-input application — a fully open-source alternative to commercial tools such as Typeless, Wispr Flow, Lazy, and Superwhisper. Official site: openless.top.
Place your cursor in any text field — ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Notion, an email draft, a chat box — press a single global hotkey, and speak. OpenLess records the audio, transcribes it, polishes the text in the mode you selected, and inserts the result at the cursor. If insertion is blocked, the text is copied to the clipboard instead, so nothing you said is lost.
Unlike dictation tools that simply emit a word-for-word transcript, OpenLess's headline capability is its AI-prompt mode: you speak freely, and it adds structure, captures your constraints, and produces a context-rich prompt that you can paste directly into ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor.
Advanced systems all do the same thing: they turn today's communication into tomorrow's default rules. The Internet won not because HTTP was faster, but because no one negotiates how data is transmitted anymore. Git won not because the code was better, but because teams stopped coordinating versions every day. Stripe won not because payments were faster, but because developers stopped coordinating with banks.
What OpenLess does is not "faster dictation" — it eliminates every act of coordination between a thought and clean text. Turning what's in your head into usable text used to mean deciding, over and over: what tone for this one? how is that name spelled? which input field, copy or paste? where does the model's key live, and who has access? OpenLess sediments those repeated negotiations, layer by layer, into defaults:
- Tone sediments into a style pack — named, switchable, live at a keystroke, never re-decided.
- Proper nouns sediment into dictionary hotwords — recognized by the ASR, hinted to the polish model, never re-corrected.
- Where text lands sediments into a single insertion protocol — hold → speak → it appears at the cursor, with an automatic clipboard fallback.
- Model and credentials sediment into the OS vault — authorized once at launch, never renegotiated.
That is what authorizing the infrastructure once, at launch means: on first run you grant the microphone, accessibility, and cloud credentials exactly once; from that moment, "speak → clean text at the cursor" is no longer a negotiation you run each time, but a default protocol you can forget is even there. Judge OpenLess not by how much faster it is, but by how much coordination it removes.
✨ What's new
Capabilities that sediment yet more of the coordination you used to repeat every day into defaults:
- 📖 A dictionary that learns. Until now the dictionary only knew what you typed into it by hand. Now, when you correct a word OpenLess just wrote, it asks — once, on a small card — whether to remember it, and one click puts it in. Paired with cursor context (opt-in, macOS), which lets the polish model read what you are writing around your cursor, OpenLess stops being a transcriber that guesses at homophones and starts being an input method that knows your words. Every suggestion is reviewed by you; nothing is learned silently.
- 🎨 Style Pack Marketplace. OpenLess no longer ships a single fixed "polish" voice. Build your own style packs with custom system prompts, switch between them with a hotkey, and install community packs in one click — or publish your own to share. When a style is tuned to your exact task (cold emails, commit messages, 小红书 posts, formal reports, your team's tone), the output is not merely cleaner — it is noticeably better, because the model is finally writing the way you intend.
- ⚡ Streaming insertion. Text now flows to your cursor character by character as it is polished, rather than making you wait for the complete result. Perceived latency drops sharply, so dictation feels nearly as fast as thinking — and it automatically falls back to a one-shot paste when an application cannot accept streamed keystrokes.
A concrete example
Hold the hotkey and say:
uh… so… I need to reply to the client about the proposal they sent last time, we talked it over internally and the overall direction is fine but a few details need changing, first the delivery timeline is too tight we'd like to push it back two weeks, second on budget their quote came in about twenty percent higher than we expected can we negotiate that, and overall we're positive about working together so reassure them, keep the tone polite not too blunt
Release the hotkey. A moment later, your input box reads:
Reply to the client about the proposal they sent. After internal discussion, the overall direction is fine, but a few details need adjusting:
1. Delivery timeline
(a) The current timeline is too tight; we'd like to extend it by two weeks.
2. Budget
(a) Their quote is about 20% higher than we expected — can we renegotiate?
Keep the overall message positive about the partnership, and keep the tone polite rather than blunt.
No edits are required — paste it into ChatGPT or Claude and let it draft the email. That is the core idea: compose prompts by speaking, faster and more cleanly than typing them.
Why OpenLess is open source
The closest alternatives are subscription SaaS products: a monthly fee, no option to bring your own model, your audio uploaded to the vendor, and your dictionary and habits stored in their account.
OpenLess targets the same end-user experience, but:
- Fully open source, local-first. The code lives in this repository, and all of your data stays on your machine.
- Bring your own cloud credentials. A dozen-plus ASR and polish providers — Volcengine, iFlytek, Alibaba Cloud Bailian, StepFun, OpenAI-compatible endpoints, and more — or any endpoint you bring. No vendor lock-in.
- Tuned for AI prompts. The structured mode reshapes loose speech into a prompt complete with context, constraints, and requests — ready to paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor.
- It will not answer for you. The model only cleans up your text. If you say "what features does this app still need?", it returns that as a clean question — it does not hand you a feature list. For that, ask the AI itself.
Use cases
- Writing prompts for ChatGPT / Claude / Cursor / Gemini — dictate a request and OpenLess turns it into a structured, detailed prompt.
- Drafting emails, specifications, and long Slack or WeChat messages — filler is removed, punctuation is corrected, and paragraphs are organized.
- Code comments, commit messages, and PR descriptions — capture your thoughts directly at the cursor.
- Any situation where you must produce written text but would rather not type.
Style packs & the Marketplace
A style pack is a named output style with its own system prompt. Rather than being constrained to one built-in "polish" voice, you can shape exactly how your speech is rendered — and the closer the style matches your real task, the better the result.
- Create and customize. On the Style page, add a pack and write a custom system prompt (for example, "terse engineering commit messages", "warm customer-support replies", or "小红书 copy with emoji"). Switch the active pack with a hotkey.
- Install from the community. Open the Marketplace to browse, search, and install packs others have shared in one click, and like the ones that work for you.
- Publish your own. Sign in with a GitHub identity (Settings → Marketplace), then select Publish to Marketplace from the Style page. Uploads are moderated before they appear publicly.
The marketplace is served by OpenLess's own moderated backend, so the catalog remains curated rather than a free-for-all.
Project direction
OpenLess does one thing: it turns speech into usable written text — AI prompts in particular — at the current cursor.
- It does not answer questions, run tasks, or analyze your project.
- It does not accumulate conversation context; every dictation is an independent cleanup request.
- The pipeline is: speech → transcript → cleanup → insertion at the cursor, with a clipboard fallback on failure.
- Everything else (modes, dictionary, history, menu bar, home report) exists to support that single path.
Comparison
| Tool |
Form |
How OpenLess differs |
| Typeless |
Closed-source macOS / Windows / iOS, subscription |
Open source; explicit AI-prompt mode; bring-your-own ASR + LLM; data and dictionary stay on your machine — including what the dictionary learns from your corrections, which is never uploaded and never added without your confirmation |
| Wispr Flow |
Closed-source macOS / Windows, subscription |
Open source; bring-your-own ASR + LLM; transparent prompt-handling rules |
| Lazy |
Closed-source notes / capture tool |
Not a notes container — inserts straight into any input field |
| Superwhisper |
Closed-source macOS, subscription |
Open source; cloud ASR today, local ASR on the roadmap |
Status
Every item below is one more layer sedimented into a default — a capability you authorize once and then never manage again. This is the infrastructure you stand on after launch:
- The shared Rust backend lives in
openless-core. macOS and Windows use a thin Tauri 2 host with the React/TypeScript frontend; Android keeps the Tauri mobile host. Linux uses a separate native host and will not compile Tauri or WebKitGTK.
- 🎨 Style Pack Marketplace — browse, install, and like community style packs from the in-app Marketplace, and publish your own (custom system prompt per pack, switchable by hotkey). Backed by a moderated marketplace backend; uploads are reviewed before they go public.
- ⚡ Streaming insertion — polished text is written to the cursor character by character to reduce perceived latency, with an automatic one-shot-paste fallback. Toggle in Settings → Recording.
- Toggle and push-to-talk recording modes, plus a MediaPlayPause trigger so wired-earbud inline controls can start and stop recording.
Esc cancels at any phase, including polish and insertion.
- Cloud ASR: Volcengine streaming ASR (bigasr), Tencent Cloud Hunyuan realtime ASR (Hy-ASR), iFlytek realtime ASR (RTASR), Alibaba Cloud Bailian (classic realtime / Qwen3 realtime / Fun-ASR-Flash file transcription), StepFun StepAudio (batch + realtime), Zhipu GLM-ASR, Xiaomi MiMo ASR, OrcaRouter audio-input Gemini, ElevenLabs Scribe, OpenAI-compatible batch transcription (OpenAI Whisper / Groq / SiliconFlow SenseVoice / OpenRouter / ZenMux), and Apple Speech (macOS).
- Local ASR: bundled Qwen3-ASR (0.6B / 1.7B) via vendored
Open-Less/qwen-asr (macOS); Windows Foundry Local Whisper and sherpa-onnx (experimental) variants.
- Polish providers: Ark (Volcengine), DeepSeek, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Codex OAuth, SiliconFlow, Atlas Cloud, Xiaomi MiMo, Tencent Cloud TokenHub, CometAPI, OpenRouter, OrcaRouter, Alibaba Cloud Coding Plan, CodingPlanX, MiniMax, StepFun, and OpenCode Zen — plus any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you bring.
- Four output modes: raw, light polish, structured (AI-prompt mode), and formal. Plus a translation hotkey that converts speech directly into the configured target language (#43).
- Selection-ask QA panel — a separate hotkey opens a floating panel that runs voice Q&A against the highlighted text in any app (#118).
- Main window: Overview / History / Vocab / Style / Marketplace / Settings. Persistent tray icon, plus a mini status capsule that floats on screen and follows the display you are typing on (multi-monitor).
- Local model management — manage on-disk local-ASR model storage from Settings.
- Multilingual UI — Settings → Language switches between 简体中文 / 繁體中文 / English / 日本語 / 한국어 (auto-detected on first launch).
- In-app auto-update on the Tauri hosts — Settings → About → Check; signed updater artifacts via the Tauri updater plugin on macOS, Windows, and Android. Linux has an independent manifest and updater contract.
- Beta channel (opt-in) — Settings → About → Join Beta channel exposes the latest pre-release build for manual download. Beta releases never reach Stable users automatically (see Contributing workflow).
- Distribution channels — direct DMG/EXE from Releases, Homebrew Cask (
brew install --cask openless), and a Windows installer. Linux packages are not published until the separate egui UI is complete and its release gate is enabled.
- Single-instance lock — prevents two OpenLess processes from racing the same hotkey edge.
- Dictionary entries are injected as Volcengine ASR
context.hotwords and as semantic hints during polish; hits accumulate per session.
- Platform-native global hotkey: CGEventTap on macOS, low-level keyboard hook (
WH_KEYBOARD_LL) on Windows.
Download & install (end users)
Go to Releases and download:
- macOS:
OpenLess_<version>_aarch64.dmg (Apple Silicon) or OpenLess_<version>_x64.dmg (Intel). Open it, drag the app to /Applications, then run the following once in Terminal to bypass the Gatekeeper "damaged" warning (the build is ad-hoc signed, not Apple-notarized):xattr -cr /Applications/OpenLess.app
- Windows:
OpenLess_<version>_x64-setup.exe — run the installer.
- Android (release APKs on GitHub Release; debug APKs via Actions artifacts):
- Phones (recommended):
OpenLess_<version>_arm64-v8a.apk
- Older 32-bit ARM:
OpenLess_<version>_armeabi-v7a.apk
- 64-bit emulator:
OpenLess_<version>_x86_64.apk
- 32-bit emulator:
OpenLess_<version>_x86.apk
- In-app updates (Settings → About) use
latest-android-{arch}.json manifests; Beta users join Beta in Advanced settings.
- Debug smoke builds:
OpenLess-android-debug-{abi}-*.apk from workflow_dispatch artifacts.
- If unsure, run
adb shell getprop ro.product.cpu.abi and pick the matching APK.
- Linux: the Tauri/WebView build has been retired.
linux-egui now contains a native eframe UI backed by the shared Core 2.0 services. Production release still requires Linux CI artifacts plus real Ubuntu audio, focus/input, install, upgrade, and rollback evidence.
- macOS (Homebrew):
brew tap Open-Less/openless https://github.com/Open-Less/openless
brew install --cask openless
xattr -cr /Applications/OpenLess.app
# Upgrade to the latest version
brew update && brew upgrade openless
On first launch, grant the permissions the app requests.
macOS:
- Grant Microphone access.
- Grant Accessibility access.
- Quit and reopen the app — Accessibility only takes effect after a restart.
- Open Settings and fill in your Volcengine ASR + Ark credentials.
Windows:
- Grant Microphone access when prompted.
- Open Settings → Permissions to verify the global hotkey l
OpenLess is an open-source voice-input app for macOS, Windows, and Linux: hold a hotkey, speak, and AI-polished text is inserted directly at your cursor in any app.