Ghost Pepper: 100% local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

Ghost Pepper is a new macOS menu-bar app that promises quick, private speech-to-text — hold Control to record, release to transcribe and paste. It targets macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon (M1+), runs as a minimal menu-bar utility, and offers a local LLM to clean up filler words and self-corrections. The project touts that "no data leaves your machine"; it has been reported that the speech and text models are downloaded from Hugging Face on first run and then cached locally.

How it works

Under the hood Ghost Pepper uses two open-source models: WhisperKit (small.en, ~466 MB) for speech-to-text and Qwen 2.5 (1.5B + 3B, ~3 GB) for post-processing and cleanup. The models download automatically the first time you launch the app and are served via Hugging Face before being cached. Smart move: run inference on-device, reduce latency, and keep things offline — at least according to the repository. The repo credits WhisperKit, LLM.swift, Hugging Face, and Sparkle, and the app ships under an MIT license.

Permissions and enterprise deployment

The app requires Microphone permission to record and Accessibility permission to implement the global hotkey and simulate paste keystrokes. It allegedly does no logging to disk — debug logs are claimed to exist only in memory and disappear when the app quits. For managed fleets, admins can pre-approve Accessibility via an MDM PPPC payload; the repo lists the bundle ID (com.github.matthartman.ghostpepper), Team ID (BBVMGXR9AY), and the Accessibility permission value for preconfiguration.

Getting started

You can grab a DMG from the GitHub release page (https://github.com/matthartman/ghost-pepper) or build from source in Xcode. Grant Microphone and Accessibility when prompted, hold Control to speak, release to have words cleaned up and pasted into the active field. Privacy-first speech on your Mac — spicy, and free, while some competitors chased big funding rounds. Who wouldn't want that?

Sources: github.com/matthartman, Hacker News