Hex voice-to-text app for macOS
Shares rank 4 of 26 dictation apps by recommenders
Free, fast macOS dictation app that transcribes near-instantly with local Parakeet models. Critics say it is Mac-only and mid-rewrite.
Free, fast macOS dictation app that transcribes near-instantly with local Parakeet models. Critics say it is Mac-only and mid-rewrite.
43 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 26
- criticize it
- 17
- approval share
- 60%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 26 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Near-instant transcription, faster than alternatives
“is even faster than Handy because it’s a native MacOS-only app that leverages CoreML/Neural Engine for extremely quick transcriptions”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Free Alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue” “I later discovered Hex and it was even faster and did not have those issues, so I stuck with it”
Comment from 29 Jun 2026 in “Yap – free offline voice dictation for Mac/Windows/Linux (Wispr Flow alt)” “For MacOS I haven’t seen any STT app that has faster transcription than Hex”
Comment from 27 Feb 2026 in “Parakeet.cpp – Parakeet ASR inference in pure C++ with Metal GPU acceleration” - Comment from 19 Jul 2026 in “Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb”
- Comment from 28 Jun 2026 in “Yap – free offline voice dictation for Mac/Windows/Linux (Wispr Flow alt)”
- Comment from 29 Apr 2026 in “Microsoft VibeVoice: Open-Source Frontier Voice AI”
- Comment from 12 Feb 2026 in “Pure C, CPU-only inference with Mistral Voxtral Realtime 4B speech to text model”
- Comment from 25 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Moonshine Open-Weights STT models – higher accuracy than WhisperLargev3”
- Comment from 13 Feb 2026 in “Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?”
- Comment from 12 Feb 2026 in “Pure C, CPU-only inference with Mistral Voxtral Realtime 4B speech to text model”
- Comment from 16 Feb 2026 in “Why Audio Is the One Area Small Labs Are Winning”
Free, good-enough accuracy
“Feels the leanest (& cleanest) free options mentioned for Mac in this thread.”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “Handy – free open source speech-to-text app” “strikes the balance of good, fast, and cheap for everyday transcription”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Free Alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue” “if you're on MacOS you can use it for free with Hex”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Ghost Pepper – 100% local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS” - Comment from 15 Sep 2026 in “Show HN: Jexxa: High Speed on Device Dictation”
- Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “Handy – free open source speech-to-text app”
Lightweight native macOS app
“is even faster than Handy because it’s a native MacOS-only app that leverages CoreML/Neural Engine for extremely quick transcriptions”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Free Alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue” “Feels the leanest (& cleanest) free options mentioned for Mac in this thread.”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “Handy – free open source speech-to-text app” “Faster than handy and uses way less memory.”
Comment from 12 Feb 2026 in “Pure C, CPU-only inference with Mistral Voxtral Realtime 4B speech to text model” Hold a key to dictate
“You just hold down a hot key to talk and it writes into whatever text entry widget is focussed.”
Comment from 6 Jun 2026 in “What was your "Oh Shit" moment with GenAI?” “it's so nice to just hold a button (or double tap to lock recording)”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “Codex-Maxxing”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Requires recent macOS version
“The brew recipe [1] says macOS >= 15.”
Comment from 25 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Moonshine Open-Weights STT models – higher accuracy than WhisperLargev3” “the brew command errors out saying it only works on macOS versions older than Sequoia”
Comment from 25 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Moonshine Open-Weights STT models – higher accuracy than WhisperLargev3”
Other dictation apps people recommend
The four most recommended other dictation apps, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Handy | 150 | 20 | 88% | 12 | 1 mo5 owners | Approved |
| Wispr Flow | 52 | 33 | 61% | 12 | — | — |
| MacWhisper | 31 | 9 | 78% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Hex voice-to-text app for macOSThis page | 26 | 17 | 60% | 10 | — | — |
| macOS Dictation | 26 | 44 | 37% | 10 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 53 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“It's the generic tech landing boiler plate page with a very poor color palette.”
“The PoC was smooth. My colleagues love it.”
“found their ai to be really useful for spinning up basically ephemeral dashboards”
“that is one of the most unhinged landing pages i've ever seen, it looks like a vibe coded claude mess”
“Definitely unhinged, but in a somewhat interesting way. It's like they made "AI slop" into a design language and decided to play with it.”
“If we didn’t have Hex, we might’ve left more than $100M on the table.”
“easily one of my favorite tools. It is maybe the one BI tool that I have felt truly attached to in my career”
“The massive lag and jitter as I try to scroll down doesn't feel very cool.”
“the efficacy of the Hex agent has made it our go-to for just about all of our analytics”
“Half of the boxes overlap at least on Safari, it's actually just broken.”
“The reliable layer that captures the data. That is what they bring to the table. For now.”
“makes everything hard to maintain, creates a ton of duplication”
“I used to use Hex but Marimo (OSS local first) honestly renders it completely obsolete for me”
“which was 7x cheaper (for our use case)”
“is a nice open source app, although it's in the middle of a rewrite into rust and cross-platform support is still in progress”
“which are free and work great for my uses”
“I use the Hex app on MacOs for near instant transcription with Parakeet V3”
“I later discovered Hex and it was even faster and did not have those issues, so I stuck with it”
“Near-instant accurate-enough transcription using local Parakeet V3”
“You just hold down a hot key to talk and it writes into whatever text entry widget is focussed.”
“it's so nice to just hold a button (or double tap to lock recording)”
“Hex now allows you to use the full power and flexibility of AI code generation”
“near-instant good-enough transcription for talking to AI agents”
“if you're on MacOS you can use it for free with Hex”
“For MacOS I haven’t seen any STT app that has faster transcription than Hex”
“The brew recipe [1] says macOS >= 15.”
“the brew command errors out saying it only works on macOS versions older than Sequoia”
“has even faster transcription (with Parakeet V3)”
“Hex is great and not trying to pull you away from them”
“I installed a few different STT apps at the same time that used Parakeet and I think they disagreed with each other.”
“crashed every time I released the button after dictating. Completely unusable.”
“is even faster than Handy because it’s a native MacOS-only app that leverages CoreML/Neural Engine for extremely quick transcriptions”
“strikes the balance of good, fast, and cheap for everyday transcription”
“stunningly fast, near-instant transcription”
“even long ramblings transcribed within a second”
“Indeed it's extremely fast, now my go-to for STT on MacOS.”
“Faster than handy and uses way less memory.”
“Feels the leanest (& cleanest) free options mentioned for Mac in this thread.”
“https://hex.kitlangton.com/ is good”
“Hex.pm and Mix for building and dependency management are miles better than anything node has to offer”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.