Free, GPLv3, and each with its own tuned AI model.
FluidVoice is the rare case where both sides ship a custom AI model built specifically for cleaning up dictation. This page is about where the two apps genuinely differ: macOS version support, engine choice, and what happens if you cancel by accident.
Quick answer
FluidVoice or EnviousWispr: which should you choose?
Both apps are free, GPLv3, and can transcribe and polish speech on your Mac. Choose FluidVoice if you want more than a dozen speech-model choices, local meeting recording, an Intel or Windows route, or deeper prompt routing. Choose EnviousWispr if you want ready-made defaults on macOS 14 or later, direct paste with Escape Recovery, and a built-in polish model whose base model and license are published. FluidVoice is the more configurable toolkit; EnviousWispr picks the defaults for you. We set key EnviousWispr defaults from our own tests. Neither choice requires a subscription or account, so the practical decision is how much you want to configure, rather than price. If you dictate mainly on a newer Mac, both cover the core job well. The stronger reason to switch is a missing workflow or compatibility feature, not a basic difference in transcription privacy.
Still deciding? See the best Mac dictation apps by use case or browse all 17 dictation app comparisons.
Feature comparison
An honest look at how the two tools stack up across the dimensions that matter most.
| EnviousWispr | FluidVoice | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free. No subscription. | Free. No subscription. |
| Account required | No | No |
| Source code | Open source (GPLv3) | Open source (GPLv3) |
| macOS required | 14 Sonoma or later | 15 Sequoia or later |
| Speech engines | Parakeet Ultra + Whisper, switch in Settings | More than a dozen choices across Apple Speech, Cohere, Fluid Speech, Nemotron, Parakeet, and Whisper |
| AI polish (cleanup after transcription) | EG-1 (our own tuned model), S1-mini by Superwhisper, Apple Intelligence, Ollama, or your own OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini key | Fluid-1 plus broad provider choice: OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Groq, Cerebras, Google, OpenRouter, Ollama, LM Studio, or a custom endpoint |
| Needs a prompt to be written | No: EG-1, S1-mini by Superwhisper, and Apple Intelligence ship with a working default | No: a working default ships with the app, and prompt profiles can be edited or routed by app |
| AI polish model's license disclosed | Yes: EG-1 Community Model License, published, base model named (Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507) | Not published in the app's own repository as of 2026-08-21 |
| Live preview while speaking | Yes, on by default; a Mac that cannot run it shows the ordinary recording bar | Yes, real-time transcription overlay |
| Recover a cancelled dictation | Yes (Escape Recovery, on by default, keybind/triple-press cancel only) | Partly: Escape saves the cancelled text to History, when History is on, without pasting it |
| Custom vocabulary | Yes (names, terms, jargon; imports from 8 other apps, FluidVoice included) | Yes (aliases, import/export, auto-learning, and Train by Voice) |
| Transcription latency | 0.61s median; ~1.65s with on-device AI polish | Not published |
| Platform support today | macOS (Apple Silicon only) and Android 13+ | macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel via Whisper). A Windows prerelease build is available; iOS is announced, not yet shipped. |
| Multi-language | 25 European (Parakeet), 99+ via Whisper | Up to 99 via Whisper; 40 via Nemotron, 25 via Parakeet, 14 via Cohere, depending on engine chosen |
| Text lands in the right app | Yes (target app reactivation via Accessibility API, three-tier paste fallback) | Yes (direct insertion or clipboard paste, configurable) |
FluidVoice claims sourced from github.com/altic-dev/FluidVoice (README, repo description), the GitHub API, prior internal research (2026-06-23), FluidVoice v1.6.9 opened directly, and release notes through v1.6.12-beta.1. EnviousWispr latency from production PostHog data on Apple Silicon Macs. Competitor claims last verified: 2026-10-17.
Both ship a tuned AI model. Here is what else EnviousWispr adds
FluidVoice built something genuinely impressive in Fluid-1, a model tuned for the exact problem we tuned EG-1 for. This is what separates the two apps around that shared idea.
EnviousWispr runs on macOS 14 Sonoma and later. FluidVoice needs macOS 15 Sequoia or later, one version newer. If you have not updated yet, EnviousWispr still works for you.
Escape Recovery keeps a dictation you cancel with your keybind or a triple press, polishes it, and offers Undo to put it back where you were typing. On by default; you can switch it off. FluidVoice now saves a cancelled dictation to History when History is on, but does not offer to put it back for you.
EG-1 ships under a published EG-1 Community Model License, and we name its base model, a fine-tune of Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507. FluidVoice's Fluid-1 model and runtime are not part of its GPLv3 app repository and we found no equivalent public license for the model itself.
Measured in production on Apple Silicon Macs. Parakeet Ultra runs on the Neural Engine specifically tuned for fast, accurate dictation, so text appears almost instantly after you stop talking.
Built-in filler-word removal runs before AI polish, and it is language-aware: with your language locked to German, Dutch, Danish, or Norwegian in Settings, it keeps real words like "er" and "um" instead of stripping them as English filler.
Smart Import reads your custom vocabulary straight out of FluidVoice's own files, without changing them, and shows you every word before anything joins your library. No retyping.
Where does your voice go?
Both apps process your voice on your Mac by default. For a deeper dive, read on-device vs cloud dictation privacy.
Parakeet Ultra: built for speed
EnviousWispr uses Parakeet Ultra, a multilingual ASR model covering 25 European languages that runs natively on the Apple Neural Engine. No network dependency, no server queues.
Based on production data from Apple Silicon Macs. Results vary by hardware and settings. FluidVoice does not publish comparable latency figures.
Two tuned models, two different disclosures
Both apps solved the same problem: a general-purpose transcript needs cleanup a raw ASR model cannot do on its own. The difference is what each project tells you about how.
FluidVoice offers more than a dozen choices across Apple Speech, Cohere, Fluid Speech, Nemotron, Parakeet, and Whisper. The list includes streaming, multilingual, small, and large options with different speed and language trade-offs.
EnviousWispr keeps it to two: Parakeet Ultra for the 25 languages it covers best, and Whisper filling in the other 74, switched manually under Dictation Settings, Engine. There is no larger menu on purpose. We set key defaults for this pairing from our own tests.
Fluid-1 is a genuine achievement: a model fine-tuned specifically for turning rough dictation into clean text, shipped free with the app, no prompt required. EG-1 exists for the same reason and works the same way. Neither app makes you write your own cleanup instructions.
Where they differ is disclosure. Our README names EG-1's base model, states its license terms, and explains what you can and cannot do with it. FluidVoice's app code is GPLv3, but the Fluid-1 runtime and weights sit outside that repository, and we could not find a published license or model card for it as of this writing. That may simply mean it has not been written yet, not that it does not exist; we welcome a correction if one is published.
Choose FluidVoice if any of this matters more to you
FluidVoice is a genuinely capable, free, open source project with real technical ambition. It may be the better fit here:
FluidVoice offers more than a dozen speech-model choices across six families, including its own Fluid Speech models. EnviousWispr ships two engines and sets key defaults from its own tests. If comparing engines is part of the fun for you, FluidVoice gives you far more to try.
FluidVoice's Whisper option supports Intel Macs. EnviousWispr requires Apple Silicon.
FluidMeet records meetings on your Mac with live captions, speaker labels and transcripts you can correct and play back. EnviousWispr labels speakers in recordings you import, but does not record meetings.
FluidVoice has over 12,000 stars on GitHub as of October 2026, well ahead of our own repository, along with an active following that grew quickly after launch.
FluidVoice's own GitHub repository offers a Windows prerelease build, with iOS support announced but not yet shipped. EnviousWispr runs on Mac and Android, with no Windows version.
FluidVoice takes a dragged-in WAV, MP3, M4A, OGG, MP4, WhatsApp voice notes and more. EnviousWispr transcribes audio and video files too, with local or cloud cleanup and a switch between the original, the cleaned text and a marked-up view; check the supported formats before you count on a rarer one.
If you want more than a dozen speech-model choices, local meeting recording, deep prompt routing, or an Intel Mac path, FluidVoice is a strong pick. If you want ready-made defaults and a polish model fine-tuned for dictation on more macOS versions, give EnviousWispr a try. You can always use both.
Common questions
Yes. Both EnviousWispr and FluidVoice are completely free, with no subscription and no account required. Both are also open source under the same license, GPLv3, so you can read the code that runs on your Mac.
Both are Mac-native, on-device, GPLv3, and ship a custom AI model tuned specifically for cleaning up dictation. EnviousWispr supports macOS 14 Sonoma and later; FluidVoice needs macOS 15 Sequoia or later. FluidVoice offers more than a dozen speech-model choices across Apple Speech, Cohere, Fluid Speech, Nemotron, Parakeet, and Whisper; EnviousWispr offers Parakeet Ultra and Whisper. FluidVoice also has deeper prompt routing, spoken formatting, and Command Mode. EnviousWispr ships two engines and sets key defaults from its own tests. Its Escape Recovery polishes a dictation cancelled by accident and offers Undo to put it back where you were typing, where FluidVoice saves a cancelled dictation to History when History is on.
Yes. FluidVoice ships Fluid Intelligence, also called Fluid-1, and a working default prompt. It also supports OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Groq, Cerebras, Google, OpenRouter, Ollama, LM Studio, and custom OpenAI-compatible endpoints, with reusable prompt profiles and app overrides. EnviousWispr offers a shorter, curated provider list, marks the local Ollama models that passed its own cleanup tests, and ships its own EG-1 model with published license and base-model details.
Yes. After the one-time model download, transcription runs entirely on-device with no internet required. AI polish can also run offline using EG-1 (our own model, macOS 14+), S1-mini by Superwhisper, Apple Intelligence (macOS 26+), or Ollama with a local model. Cloud providers like OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini are optional and require your own API key.
Yes, and under the exact same license. Both EnviousWispr and FluidVoice's app code are licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3), an OSI-approved copyleft license. In both cases, the polish model itself sits outside that license under its own separate terms: our EG-1 under the EG-1 Community Model License, and FluidVoice's Fluid-1 under terms it has not published in the same place as its app code.
Yes. EnviousWispr's Smart Import reads your custom vocabulary directly out of FluidVoice, without changing FluidVoice's own files, and shows you every word it found before anything joins your library. It also imports from Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, Handy, TypeWhisper, Spokenly, Juno, and Vox.
EnviousWispr needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later. FluidVoice needs macOS 15 Sequoia or later, one version newer. Both need Apple Silicon for their primary engines, though FluidVoice also supports Intel Macs through its Whisper option.
EnviousWispr runs Parakeet Ultra for 25 European languages and Whisper for 99+ languages, switched manually under Dictation Settings, Engine. FluidVoice 1.6.9 showed 14 choices across Apple Speech, Cohere, Parakeet, Nemotron, and Whisper, and version 1.6.11 added two smaller English-only Fluid Speech models, Mini and Pico.
Windows, partly. FluidVoice's own GitHub repository description states a Windows pre-build is available, so a Windows version exists though it may be earlier-stage than the Mac app. iOS is not shipped; the repository lists it as planned. EnviousWispr runs on Apple Silicon Macs and Android phones, with no Windows or iPhone app.
Yes. Download EnviousWispr, set your keybind, and Smart Import can bring your FluidVoice custom words across in one pass. There is no other data to migrate. Both apps work in any text field on macOS, so nothing about your workflow has to change.
Free, GPLv3, and it runs on more Macs.
Free to download. No account required. A tuned AI model with a published license, on macOS 14 and later.