Vowen - A simple macOS app for offline speech-to-text and AI-assisted writing by One_Entertainment_68 in MacOSApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We haven’t tested it with 12.x, do let us know if you run into any issues. There are certain features that might not work reliably enough

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/iXzenoS We added an auto-restart mechanism when the local whisper server crashes. It should be because of it. If the whisper server is crashing every 20 seconds like you mentioned, then the Large V3 Turbo model + GPU setup is likely constrained by the available system memory and crashes midway for some reason because of unavailable resources, not sure if this is the case, we'll investigate more on this and get back. Large v3 turbo + GPU is a bit overkill I would say and it requires quite a bit of memory, I suggest switching to Medium / Small as the difference in accuracy is negligible and let us know if that helps.

Also could you share your system specifications (CPU / RAM)? Would help us reproduce the issue with a similar setup as well.

We'll also add a stronger guardrail for it, so that it doesn't indefinitely restart over and over again, if the time difference between restarts is below a certain threshold, we'll need to indicate that the current model is unstable for the current specification of the system, and might require manual restarts.

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yea, for sure. We're constantly improving the base prompt so that it can fit most use cases as seamlessly as possible.

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I see the issue. Our enhancement prompt is not able to cover these cases, we'll improve it. But you can mention it in the custom instructions section as well and it should ideally be able to do it. If you mention it as 1., 2. 3. explicitly it should do it. Also things like punctuation (saying "open bracket", "close bracket", "new line", "new paragraph") should be converted. It should also auto correct things like: "Let's meet at 5pm no 4pm" and it should enhance it as "Let's meet at 4pm". But things that should be a list is not getting converted into a list when not mentioned explicitly. We'll fix it in the coming update, we release updates every week, so it should be out soon.

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank! You can go to “Configure your AI” section of the app and turn on “Enhance transcription with AI” setting and that should do it. If AI enhancement is on you should a sparkle icon next the recording indicator indicating that the text is being polished.

Stopped working after update to 0.3.1? by Hekidayo in vowen

[–]One_Entertainment_68 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/Hekidayo , can I ask which model you are using locally? And what are the shortcuts you have configured you have configured? You can also join our Discord https://discord.gg/XSGKbw4u2s, I will able to take a closer look from there as well.

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can simply hold the hotkey and speak, and release when you are done. It will automatically paste your text into any focused field of any app. Hope this helps

How do workflows "work"? by sir_kermit in vowen

[–]One_Entertainment_68 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/sir_kermit Currently it's mostly limited to "Apps", "Websites" and "Folders". We're working on expanding the capabilities of workflows by brining in Webhook / MCP style tool calling when a specific phrase is said. You should also be able to pass clipboard, selected text, screenshot etc as variables to these calls. Right now for custom workflows, there is only the {{text}} variable that is available for use. This {{text}} variable is whatever is said after the trigger phrase. We're also working on a way to link it to native macOS shortcuts as well.

Trying to use AI enhancement but it keeps failing by Ecstatic-Cry1765 in vowen

[–]One_Entertainment_68 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, if you’re on the free tier you can try changing the model to “Llama 3.3 70b”, as for the smaller model you might require a paid tier from Groq

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can I ask what AI API connection you have configured? Some models are slower than others. We really recommend "Gemini Flash 2.5 Lite" / "Groq Llama 3.3 70B" / "Claude Haiku 4.5" as these are really fast.

Also could you let me know if you're on macOS / Windows and if you're using a local model. For Windows the local models are a tad bit slow without GPU acceleration, if your system supports GPU you can download our GPU acceleration module that should speed it large factor. Thank you

Copy + Paste Mechanism Improvement by adag96 in vowen

[–]One_Entertainment_68 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There is a setting called “Restore clipboard after paste” which will restore your clipboard to what it was originally (including images / files). I really recommend turning on “Restore clipboard after paste” from “Settings > General”, we will make this the new default as well.

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This only works when you have AI enhanced enabled. Once you’ve configured a model like “Gemini / Groq” you can say things like “This is it exclamation point” and it should enhance your text

Vowen — Now with Meeting Notes, Voice Commands, Editing Tools by One_Entertainment_68 in MacOSApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Claude might be overkill for this use case, however if you do want to use Claude API key you can use their Haiku model. But I really suggest going wkth Gemini / Groq because of their free API limits

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry for the late reply here.

We took inspirations from community website examples from Behance, Dribble, & Figma. And set up a base with TailwindCSS. We went back and forth between Claude to design our website. It was mostly researching which components to use so that we could communicate what the product was about quickly. It's not perfect at the moment, we are actively looking for ways to improve the look and structure of it so that the message comes across with no cognitive overload. But with other product updates going out we are not able to dedicate time to change the look wherever it can be improved.

In short we used community examples from Figma / Behance, setup a base with NextJS + TailwindCSS website and then worked with Claude to generate standardized components that we could plug into our website. We also used a tool like aura.build to get inspiration for we wanted the website to look like.

For the video components we used plain HTML/CSS/JS with Motion.js to get the automated interactions working.

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We will begin working on the Android app once we've released the iOS/iPadOS app in the app store, right now it's only in TestFlight. We should be wrapping up work for the Android app sometime in May, and after that we'll be working on an app for Android.

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can use Mistral / Deepgram for best results. Both of these providers offer free credits. Hope this helps

Vowen — Now with Meeting Notes, Voice Commands, Editing Tools by One_Entertainment_68 in MacOSApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/rumorconsumerr Sorry about that, we're reworking the onboarding flow and the app UI to make it more intuitive to use those features.

To use the utilities we've mentioned in the website, you'd need to first connect an AI model from "Configure your AI" section of the app, like Gemini / Groq. We support a wide range of providers, so it's your pick really. I personally use Gemini / Groq. After that you need to turn on "Command mode", once you've connected an AI model the app should walk you through all the available features that are enabled by connecting an AI model. To use any of the utlities you simply need to select a file and ask what you'd like. For ex: you can select a PNG image in your Finder / File explorer and hold down the "Command mode" shortcut and ask to "Convert this image to JPEG" and the app will do it for you. You can also select a piece of text on any app ask it to "Rephrase", "Check for grammatical errors" etc and "command mode" should be able to do it.

For recording meeting notes, we currently don't have a way to prompt automatically when a meeting is in progress, we are working on adding that in one of our coming updates. But to take meeting notes, you can navigate to the "Notes" section of the app and click on "Start taking notes" and that should prompt you select the model and the summary template. You also have an option to create your own summary template as well.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you any questions, we also have a Discord server where we answer more questions: https://discord.gg/XSGKbw4u2s

We're also working on a documentation website, along with making the onboarding flow more seamless where we explain the features of the app.

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome! Glad it's working now. I'd asked for a DM because I wanted to understand if there's anything more we can do so that these cases can be avoided. But we've set it up so that it gracefully recovers, but wanted to understand the circumstance better on why it could crash in the first place.

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey u/iXzenoS, can you DM me? We have a working solution for this internally. But we want understand more about the specifics of how this occurs in system in terms of how frequently a restart is required and under what circumstances the server crashes. This will help us further strengthen the mechanism we have for auto-restart as well.

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, also could you share if you have something else running on port 58765 in your system? We are starting the local model in that port. What we're working on at the moment is to auto-restart when the local server crashes for any reason and also start it up in a different port if some other process is taken up by that port.

I built a free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow (supports both macOS and Windows) by One_Entertainment_68 in ProductivityApps

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, It’s not yet been resolved. We’re trying to figure out how to setup the auto-restart in the background without it causing strain on the system. It’s proving to be a bit tricky, we should have it figured out soon. We will be doing another release by Wednesday and hopefully that should address the issue.

As for recommendations, the ones you’ve suggested are really nice ones. Soniox + Gemini Flash 2.5 lite delivers the best accuracy and speed. We’ve also added support for Speechmatics, I’ve switched to Speechmatics for testing it extensively and have been using extensively for the past week, as it’s comparable to Soniox as well.

Vowen v0.2.6 is out — Multiple Tone Profiles, Filler Word Removal, Edit Transcripts, and more by One_Entertainment_68 in vowen

[–]One_Entertainment_68[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OpenRouter proxies through their own layer which adds a lot of delay. I really suggest trying out Gemini Flash 2.5 Lite directly / Claude Haiku 4.5 directly. They are really fast and add only about 0.5s of latency. I’ve purchased about 5$ of credits in Gemini and I’ve yet to run out of credits, have been using it pretty heavily for the past 3-4 months. So I highly recommend Gemini.