Typeless Alternative: Hold Fn, Speak. Your Voice Stays Local.

Typeless is an excellent product. I've used it for months, and the experience is smooth—accurate recognition, and LLM polish makes casual communication clean and professional. Hold Fn, speak, release, and it automatically removes "um" and "uh," delivering text ready to send. This seamless experience is genuinely great.

But during my use, I discovered three issues I can't ignore:

1. Voice Upload Cannot Be Deleted

Every time you press Fn, your voice travels to cloud servers. Typeless claims zero data retention, but that's a policy promise, not an architectural guarantee. For legal notes, medical records, proprietary business ideas—any scenario requiring absolute privacy—cloud upload is unacceptable.

Whisper Notes runs OpenAI's Whisper large-v3-turbo locally on your Mac's Neural Engine or iPhone chip. Audio never leaves your device. This isn't policy—it's physical reality.

2. Slow Speed—ASR Then Wait for LLM Processing

Typeless workflow: Speech recognition (ASR) → Upload to cloud → LLM polish → Return text. This process takes time.

Whisper Notes transcribes directly on Neural Engine at ~10-12x real-time speed. No network latency. No server queues. A 60-second recording completes in ~5 seconds.

The tradeoff: Typeless is slower but outputs polished text; Whisper Notes is faster but verbatim.

3. $30/Month Subscription

Typeless operates cloud infrastructure—servers, third-party LLM APIs—incurring ongoing costs. Subscriptions fund that infrastructure. This is rational pricing for cloud services.

Whisper Notes has no cloud backend. Computation happens on your hardware using your electricity. No recurring costs means no recurring fees. Software running on your own device using open-source models (Whisper)—why should it be rented instead of owned?

Both apps support Fn key system-wide dictation. That's the core feature.

Whisper Notes adds:

Audio File Import: Drag in pre-recorded audio or video files. Transcribe interviews, meetings, lectures—anything already captured. Typeless focuses on live dictation only.

Model Flexibility: Currently runs Whisper large-v3-turbo. Future updates may support additional models (Parakeet, Gemini-based speech models) as they prove accuracy. Typeless uses proprietary cloud LLMs.

Export Formats: Text, SRT, VTT, JSON. If you need subtitles or structured data, Whisper Notes handles it. Typeless optimizes for text insertion at cursor.

If your workflow is purely live dictation for messages and emails, both apps work. If you need batch transcription, subtitle generation, or model choice, Whisper Notes covers broader use cases.

Typeless has genuine strengths that make it the better choice for specific users:

Polished Casual Communication: If your primary use is Slack messages and quick emails, Typeless's LLM cleanup produces notably cleaner output. It removes verbal tics automatically. For users who value polish over verbatim accuracy, this is a real benefit.

Windows Support: Whisper Notes is Mac/iOS only. If you work on Windows, Typeless is one of the few high-quality options that covers both platforms.

Context-Aware Formatting: Typeless adjusts tone and structure based on target application. Writing in Slack gets casual formatting; Gmail gets professional formatting. This is sophisticated software engineering.

Generous Free Tier: Typeless offers 4,000 words/week for free. If you're a light user, the free tier may suffice. Whisper Notes costs $4.99 upfront (minimal, but not free).

If you trust cloud processing, value AI-polished output, and work cross-platform, Typeless is well-built software. It's not inferior; it's architecturally different.

Future Plan: Local LLM Polish

We're considering adding optional local LLM post-processing—local ASR → local LLM polish. Using on-device models (like Llama or Mistral), you could get polished casual speech while maintaining privacy. Neither voice nor text would upload. This would combine the best of both worlds: polished output + architectural privacy guarantees.

Whisper Notes does not clean up your speech. If you say "um" and "like" repeatedly, the transcript includes them. This is verbatim transcription.

For professional documentation—legal depositions, medical notes, journalistic interviews—verbatim is the only acceptable mode. What was said must match what appears in the transcript.

For casual communication, verbatim can feel rough. If you dictate "So, um, like, I think we should, uh, maybe try this," that's what you get. Typeless would clean it to "I think we should try this."

Future consideration: We may add optional local LLM post-processing (on-device, using models like Llama or Mistral) for users who want cleanup without cloud upload. This would preserve privacy while adding polish. But it's not implemented yet.

Current reality: If you need polished casual output, Typeless delivers better UX. If you need verbatim accuracy or refuse cloud upload, Whisper Notes is the logical choice.

We chose to optimize for privacy and speed. That means accepting less-polished output for casual use. Strategic honesty: we trade convenience for sovereignty.