Ghost Pepper

Ghost Pepper is a free, open-source macOS app for completely private voice dictation and meeting transcription. Hold a key, speak, and your words are transcribed and pasted into any app — with every model running on your own Mac via Apple Silicon. No cloud APIs, no uploads, no data ever leaves your machine.

Overview

Ghost Pepper is an open-source project on GitHub with about 3,200 stars, actively developed in 2026. It is a menu-bar app for macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon that bundles a choice of on-device speech models — Whisper variants via WhisperKit, NVIDIA Parakeet, Qwen3-ASR and Nemotron streaming models — covering more than 50 languages. A second local LLM cleans up transcripts, removing filler words and fixing self-corrections before pasting. Beyond dictation, Ghost Pepper records and transcribes meetings, saving notes, transcripts and AI-generated summaries as local markdown files. The project publishes a detailed privacy audit of its codebase and supports optional, disabled-by-default cloud extras only if you supply your own API keys.

Key Features

• Hold-to-talk dictation pasted into any macOS app
• 100% on-device speech models — Whisper, Parakeet, Qwen3-ASR and more
• Local LLM cleanup removes fillers and fixes corrections
• Meeting recording with transcripts and AI summaries saved locally
• 50+ languages supported across the bundled models
• Published privacy audit; no analytics or tracking SDKs

💳 Pricing

Ghost Pepper is completely free and open source under the MIT license. Download the app or build it from source — there is no paid tier.

Who Is It For

Ghost Pepper is for Mac users who want fast voice dictation and meeting notes without sending audio to the cloud — writers, developers, journalists and anyone handling sensitive conversations.