GhostPepper

Ghost Pepper provides on‑device speech‑to‑text conversion and meeting transcription for macOS 14.0+ on Apple Silicon. Users hold a configurable hotkey to dictate, and the app transcribes the audio and pastes the result into any text field. It can also record calls, generate a markdown transcript, and produce an AI‑summarized notes file, all stored locally without any cloud interaction.

The application bundles several open‑source acoustic models, including Whisper variants for English and multilingual support, as well as a Parakeet model for up to 25 languages. Transcriptions are cleaned by an on‑device language model that removes filler words and handles self‑corrections, with multiple model sizes available for speed versus quality trade‑offs. All inference runs via WhisperKit and LLM.swift, and models are downloaded once from Hugging Face and cached on the machine.

Ghost Pepper lives discreetly in the menu bar, launches at login, and offers customizable settings such as microphone selection, cleanup prompts, and feature toggles. It requires microphone and accessibility permissions for global hotkey handling and simulated keystrokes, and its privacy audit confirms that every core operation—recording, transcription, cleanup, summarization, OCR, and file storage—remains 100 % local with no telemetry or external APIs.