Tuesday TOOLSday: VoiceInk
Hey friends! Yes, I know it’s Wednesday. Nobody but my mom keeps track of that, so let’s all just relax and enjoy another (technically) Tuesday TOOLSday.
This week’s tool is a fun one, courtesy of the unstoppable Paul Wilch. I was whining to him about my hands getting sore at the end of a long day of banging out a million emails and forty-seven reports, and he pointed me at VoiceInk — a Mac app that uses local AI models to transcribe your voice to text with near-perfect accuracy and complete privacy.
That “local” part is the whole reason I picked it up. I love being able to dictate emails, chunks of reports, random song ideas, and hobby stuff without piping a live stream of my brain into Claude or ChatGPT. Set a hotkey, start talking, hit the key again, and your words drop right into whatever you’re working on. I assigned the right Alt key and now I can rattle off something like “don’t forget to note that I found SQL injection on the login page, and the internal pen test needs network segmentation testing done tomorrow after hours” — and it lands scary-accurate. I’m talking T-1000 Terminator accurate.
Here’s what I get into in this video:
Why a privacy-first, fully local transcription tool scratched an itch for me (no cloud, no data leaving the Mac)
The hotkey-to-dictate workflow and how clean the output is straight out of the gate
Feeding it a full 32-minute 7MS episode and watching it transcribe — even nicely broken out by paragraph, which my tangent-filled podcasts desperately need
The Parakeet V3 local model they suggest, plus the pile of other models you can swap in
Handy extras: transcription history, custom word replacements for buzzwords/branded terms it fumbles, and an optional Claude/ChatGPT API hookup for cleanup (which I’m leaving OFF to keep mine local-only)
The price that sold me: ~$69 for a lifetime license on up to 3 devices. Not per year.
Full disclosure: this is not a sponsorship or partnership — just a tool I bought blindly for ~70 bucks figuring it’d be worth it even if I barely used it, and so far I’m a fan.
One heads-up before you go clicking: VoiceInk is Apple Silicon Mac only and needs macOS 14.4 or later, so check your specs first.
I’m still just getting into it — I’d honestly love to batch-feed every 7MS episode through this and get a big searchable show-notes page going somewhere (CLI? Whisper? we’ll see). If you’ve been using VoiceInk, hit me up and tell me what modes and models are working for you.
Have yourself a great rest of your day — and as always, we’re at 7MinSec.com if you need anything from us.
-Brian
