Keebye vs Superwhisper: Local Dictation Compared

Superwhisper and Keebye sit in the same corner of the dictation world: both are macOS apps, both can run speech-to-text entirely on your machine, and both are aimed at people who type for a living. If you're choosing between them, the honest answer is that they optimize for different days.

This page describes Superwhisper at the category level — what it's known for, not a feature-by-feature teardown of a product we don't build. For current specifics on Superwhisper, check their site.

What Superwhisper is

Superwhisper is one of the most established dictation apps on the Mac. It's known for running Whisper-family models locally, working offline, and — its signature idea — "modes": configurable presets that shape the output for a given context, like messages, emails, or notes. It has a real following among developers, including people who use it to talk to AI coding tools, and it has had years to sand down rough edges.

That maturity matters. Superwhisper has simply been at it longer than we have, and it shows in the polish.

What Keebye is

Keebye is a younger, narrower tool with one obsession: builders running several workstreams at once — an AI coding agent grinding in one terminal, a code review in another window, Slack filling up in a third. When your hands are committed to one lane, your voice drives the others.

Concretely, Keebye is a lightweight native menu-bar app (built with Tauri) that works like this:

• Hold a hotkey (Right ⌘ by default; Fn or Right ⌥ if you prefer), speak, release. Tap instead of hold to toggle longer dictations.
• Speech-to-text runs on-device: a fast English-tuned default model, an optional multilingual engine covering 25 languages, or Apple's native engine. After the model download, it works offline.
• The text lands in whatever app has focus — pasted, or synthetically typed for terminals, SSH, and tmux, where paste-based insertion often misbehaves.
• Cleanup is local too: filler words stripped and punctuation fixed by fast rules, with an optional on-device LLM polish pass that refuses to paraphrase you.
• A custom dictionary handles your project's jargon, and history is text-only, local, and auto-deleted after 30 days. No telemetry.

Keebye is in early access. It's macOS-only today, transcription is batch (your words appear when you release the key, not streamed live), and the default model is English-tuned — multilingual is a deliberate switch, not the default.

Where they genuinely differ

Customization vs focus. Superwhisper gives you modes, model choices, and knobs to shape output per context. Keebye gives you fewer knobs on purpose: one hotkey, one insertion behavior you pick once (paste or type), a dictionary, and an optional polish pass. If tuning your tool is part of the joy, Superwhisper is the richer toybox.

Terminal-first insertion. Keebye's synthetic-typing mode with terminal-aware chunking exists specifically because builders live in iTerm2, Warp, and tmux over SSH. If your dictation mostly lands in a prose editor, this difference won't matter to you.

Maturity. Superwhisper is a shipped, polished product. Keebye is v0.x software from a founder who uses it all day but will not pretend it has years of polish.

When Superwhisper might fit better

• You want configurable modes and per-context output shaping today.
• You want a mature product with a long track record and a large user community.
• You dictate primarily into documents and messages rather than terminals.
• You want to experiment with different Whisper-family models yourself.

All of that is earned — just aimed at a different center of gravity than ours.

When Keebye might fit better

• Your day is parallel AI-agent lanes and you want voice as the control channel.
• You dictate into terminals, SSH sessions, and tmux panes and need typing-style insertion.
• You want a strict local-only posture with no cloud path to reason about, plus text-only history that deletes itself.
• You'd rather adopt a small, fast tool early and shape it by filing issues.

Is Keebye a Superwhisper replacement?

For some people, eventually; for many people today, no. If Superwhisper already fits your workflow, switching buys you little. If you've bounced off dictation tools because they weren't built for a terminal-heavy, multi-lane day, Keebye is aimed at exactly that gap.

Do both keep audio on-device?

Both products are known for local processing; that's the shared value that puts them in the same conversation. For Keebye we can be precise, because we build it: all three speech engines run on your Mac, the network is used only for model downloads and update checks, and audio never leaves the machine.

How do I get Keebye?

Keebye is in early access, with builds published on GitHub releases. Try it on a real workday — that's a fairer test than any comparison page, including this one.

If you're also weighing a cloud-first tool, read Keebye vs Wispr Flow, or start with why we built this at all: Driving Claude Code with your voice.