Talkhawk is an AI dictation app for Windows that turns speech into clean text in any app you can paste into, and it does the speech recognition on your own PC. It appeared on Hacker News Show HN on October 27, 2026. Hold Ctrl and Win, talk, and let go: your words appear where you were typing, in Slack, Gmail, Outlook, Word, Notion, VS Code, Cursor, or ChatGPT. A 24-second recording becomes text in about one second on a recent desktop processor, with no internet needed.
Clean text, not a transcript
Talkhawk keeps up with the way people really talk and turns it into writing you would send. Its Polish feature removes the ums, keeps only your corrections, adds punctuation, and turns spoken lists into real lists. Command Mode lets you select text in any app, hold Ctrl, Win, and Alt, and say what to do, for example “make this shorter” or “translate to Spanish”, and the selection is replaced with the result. Hands-free mode keeps listening while your hands are off the keyboard, snippets expand phrases like “my calendly” into your booking link, and recognition understands 25 European languages.
Your voice stays on your PC
Talkhawk turns voice to text with an open speech model, NVIDIA Parakeet, that runs on your processor. Recording and speech recognition happen on your computer, audio is never uploaded and never saved to disk, and your dictation history is text stored on your PC. Polish and Command Mode send only the transcribed text to Talkhawk’s server. Turn Polish off and nothing leaves your PC.
Pricing
Pricing below comes from the official Talkhawk website, checked October 28, 2026. Prices may change, so confirm on the official site before you buy.
- Free: $0, no account and no time limit, with unlimited dictation recognized on your PC, hands-free mode, snippets, a history of your last 50 dictations, and offline use.
- Pro: $6 per month billed yearly ($72 per year), or $9 billed monthly, with everything in Free plus Polish, Command Mode, tone settings and translation, and your own words for names, brands, and jargon.
The first time you open Talkhawk, Pro is free for 14 days, with no card and no sign-up. Talkhawk needs Windows 11 on a 64-bit PC and a microphone. Visit the official website at talkhawk.app to download it.
