OpenLess

Open-source voice input for macOS & Windows

Hold a hotkey, speak, and watch AI-polished text stream straight to your cursor —
in the writing style you choose.

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Sponsors

OpenLess is sustained by the generous support of its sponsors.

jiangmuran
_{⭐ Featured Sponsor · jiangmuran.com}

Special thanks to jiangmuran for the sustained support that keeps OpenLess moving forward.

_{— with thanks to —}

悠雾云数据 · Youwu Cloud Data (knin.net)

Developers

TRIP tripmc.top

Chris233 chris233.qzz.io

Cooper github.com/Cooper-X-Oak

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.

From tool to infrastructure

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

Two capabilities that sediment yet more of the coordination you used to repeat every day into defaults:

• 🎨 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. Volcengine streaming ASR with Ark / DeepSeek-compatible chat completions. 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

Status (v1.3.6)

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:

• Tauri 2 backend in Rust with a React/TypeScript frontend. macOS 12+, Windows 10+.
• 🎨 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, OpenAI Whisper-compatible batch ASR, Apple Speech (macOS).
• Local ASR: bundled Qwen3-ASR (0.6B / 1.7B) via vendored Open-Less/qwen-asr; Windows Foundry Local Whisper variants.
• Polish providers: Ark / DeepSeek / OpenAI / Doubao / Anthropic-compatible chat completions, 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 — Settings → About → Check; signed updater artifacts via the Tauri updater plugin.
• Beta channel (opt-in) — Settings → About → Join Beta channel exposes the la