Free, local, private voice dictation for Windows — a full Wispr Flow replacement that costs nothing, forever. No account, no subscription, no word limits, and your voice never leaves this machine.
- Run
FreeFlow.exe— the app window opens and a mic icon lands in the tray. - Put your cursor in any text field, in any app.
- Hold Right Ctrl and speak — words appear while you're still talking.
- Release — FreeFlow re-checks the whole utterance with its accurate model and polishes the text in place (punctuation, capitalization, filler removal).
- Quick-tap Right Ctrl to latch hands-free; tap again (or click the pill) to stop.
While you talk, the floating pill at the bottom of the screen shows a live equalizer and the words streaming in.
| Say | Get |
|---|---|
| "new line" / "new paragraph" | line break / blank line |
| "scratch that" (mid-sentence) | wipes what you said before it |
| "scratch that" (alone) | deletes the last dictation |
- Home — status, hotkey (click to change — press any key to rebind), lifetime stats (words, words today, speaking speed), and a test area
- Dictation — live typing toggle, final-pass mode, tone, auto-edits
- Dictionary — "hey gen" → "HeyGen"; teach it names and jargon
- Shortcuts — say "my email" alone, get the full address typed
- App Profiles — tone matching per app: casual in Discord, professional in Outlook, verbatim in terminals
- History — every dictation, locally; Model — model manager; Settings — mic, hotkeys, autostart, AI endpoint
Settings apply instantly — no save button.
| Stage | Model | Job |
|---|---|---|
| Live words | Streaming Zipformer transducer (int8, 71 MB) | partial transcripts ~every 100 ms while you speak |
| Punctuation | CT-Transformer online punct (int8, 7 MB) | caps + punctuation for live text |
| Final polish | NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2 (int8, 652 MB) | re-transcribes the utterance on release; beats Whisper large-v3 on English |
| Multilingual | Whisper small/base (optional) | 100+ languages |
Command mode (select text, hold command key, say "make this more concise") works with any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — install Ollama for free local AI.
cd src\FreeFlow
dotnet build -c Release # exe → bin\Release\net8.0-windows\FreeFlow.exe
FreeFlow.exe --selftest # 33 checks: formatter, resamplers, TTS→STT, streaming partials, punctuation
FreeFlow.exe --injecttest # live text-injection proof
FreeFlow.exe --pillpreview # animated demo of the overlay pill
FreeFlow.exe --transcribe x.wav # transcribe any wavModels live in %APPDATA%\FreeFlow\models, config/history/stats in %APPDATA%\FreeFlow.