Handy Review

Our Verdict

Pick Handy for free dictation with a choice of local models. Do not pick it to caption meetings: it listens to your microphone and transcribes only after you stop recording.

Official site

Free to start.

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check_circle Pros

• ✓Choose Moonshine on lower-powered hardware instead of forcing a large Whisper model

cancel Cons

• ✕Cloud post-processing sends transcript text to your chosen provider when enabled

Should you use it?

Dictating messages on Mac, Windows, or Linux without a subscription

Is it worth the price?

Free

The Free Tier

What does Handy actually do?

On first launch, Handy asks you to download a speech model. On macOS, you also grant microphone and accessibility permissions. Hold the shortcut to record a phrase; the words land at the cursor when you release it. You can change models if the first one struggles with your language or hardware.

What you can do with it

Change the recording shortcut in settings

Enable experimental post-processing to reformat a transcript

Technical details

model_hardware

Whisper and Cohere can use GPU; Parakeet currently runs on CPU

history_retention

Local recording history has a configurable limit, including zero

recognition_models

Parakeet, Whisper, Cohere Transcribe, and other on-device models

Key Questions

Why does Parakeet spell out numbers?

That is the model output. Choose Whisper for digit formatting, or apply a post-processing prompt if you need Parakeet with numeric digits.