OpenLess is a cross-platform (macOS and Windows) voice-input application — a fully open-source alternative to commercial tools such as Typeless, Wispr Flow, Lazy, and Superwhisper. Official site: openless.top.
The native iOS app and keyboard are maintained in openless-all/ios/, with Chinese/English typing, voice-focused and hold-space input modes, and speech translation. See the iOS guide for source builds and personal signing.
Place your cursor in any text field — ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Notion, an email draft, a chat box — press a single global hotkey, and speak. OpenLess records the audio, transcribes it, polishes the text in the mode you selected, and inserts the result at the cursor. If insertion is blocked, the text is copied to the clipboard instead, so nothing you said is lost.
Unlike dictation tools that simply emit a word-for-word transcript, OpenLess's headline capability is its AI-prompt mode: you speak freely, and it adds structure, captures your constraints, and produces a context-rich prompt that you can paste directly into ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor.
From tool to infrastructure
Advanced systems all do the same thing: they turn today's communication into tomorrow's default rules. The Internet won not because HTTP was faster, but because no one negotiates how data is transmitted anymore. Git won not because the code was better, but because teams stopped coordinating versions every day. Stripe won not because payments were faster, but because developers stopped coordinating with banks.
What OpenLess does is not "faster dictation" — it eliminates every act of coordination between a thought and clean text. Turning what's in your head into usable text used to mean deciding, over and over: what tone for this one? how is that name spelled? which input field, copy or paste? where does the model's key live, and who has access? OpenLess sediments those repeated negotiations, layer by layer, into defaults:
- Tone sediments into a style pack — named, switchable, live at a keystroke, never re-decided.
- Proper nouns sediment into dictionary hotwords — recognized by the ASR, hinted to the polish model, never re-corrected.
- Where text lands sediments into a single insertion protocol — hold → speak → it appears at the cursor, with an automatic clipboard fallback.
- Model and credentials sediment into the OS vault — authorized once at launch, never renegotiated.
That is what authorizing the infrastructure once, at launch means: on first run you grant the microphone, accessibility, and cloud credentials exactly once; from that moment, "speak → clean text at the cursor" is no longer a negotiation you run each time, but a default protocol you can forget is even there. Judge OpenLess not by how much faster it is, but by how much coordination it removes.
✨ What's new
Capabilities that sediment yet more of the coordination you used to repeat every day into defaults:
- 📖 A dictionary that learns. Until now the dictionary only knew what you typed into it by hand. Now, when you correct a word OpenLess just wrote, it asks — once, on a small card — whether to remember it, and one click puts it in. Paired with cursor context (opt-in, macOS / Windows), which lets the polish model read what you are writing around your cursor, OpenLess stops being a transcriber that guesses at homophones and starts being an input method that knows your words. Every suggestion is reviewed by you; nothing is learned silently.
- 🎨 Style Pack Marketplace. OpenLess no longer ships a single fixed "polish" voice. Build your own style packs with custom system prompts, switch between them with a hotkey, and install community packs in one click — or publish your own to share. When a style is tuned to your exact task (cold emails, commit messages, 小红书 posts, formal reports, your team's tone), the output is not merely cleaner — it is noticeably better, because the model is finally writing the way you intend.
- ⚡ Streaming insertion. Text now flows to your cursor character by character as it is polished, rather than making you wait for the complete result. Perceived latency drops sharply, so dictation feels nearly as fast as thinking — and it automatically falls back to a one-shot paste when an application cannot accept streamed keystrokes.
A concrete example
Hold the hotkey and say:
uh… so… I need to reply to the client about the proposal they sent last time, we talked it over internally and the overall direction is fine but a few details need changing, first the delivery timeline is too tight we'd like to push it back two weeks, second on budget their quote came in about twenty percent higher than we expected can we negotiate that, and overall we're positive about working together so reassure them, keep the tone polite not too blunt
Release the hotkey. A moment later, your input box reads:
Reply to the client about the proposal they sent. After internal discussion, the overall direction is fine, but a few details need adjusting:
1. Delivery timeline
(a) The current timeline is too tight; we'd like to extend it by two weeks.
2. Budget
(a) Their quote is about 20% higher than we expected — can we renegotiate?
Keep the overall message positive about the partnership, and keep the tone polite rather than blunt.
No edits are required — paste it into ChatGPT or Claude and let it draft the email. That is the core idea: compose prompts by speaking, faster and more cleanly than typing them.
Why OpenLess is open source
The closest alternatives are subscription SaaS products: a monthly fee, no option to bring your own model, your audio uploaded to the vendor, and your dictionary and habits stored in their account.
OpenLess targets the same end-user experience, but:
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
