Wispr Flow vs Hearsy: Privacy, Speed & Features Compared

Wispr Flow is a Mac dictation app that sends audio and screen context to cloud servers for processing. You press a hotkey from any app, speak, and text appears at your cursor.

Wispr Flow captures screenshots of your active window every few seconds and sends them to its cloud infrastructure alongside your audio. This allows it to detect what you're doing and format output accordingly — dictating into Gmail produces email-style text, dictating into a code editor produces something more technical.

Processing runs through third-party AI providers. Wispr has confirmed it uses OpenAI and Meta's LLAMA 3.1 for transcription and formatting.

Wispr Flow pulls around 12,100 monthly brand searches in early 2026, more than any other Mac dictation app. It's VC-backed, well-designed, and actively developed.

Hearsy is a menu-bar dictation app that runs entirely on your Mac. Press a global hotkey from any app, speak, and transcribed text is pasted at your cursor. No internet connection is used during transcription. Audio is processed in local RAM by one of two AI engines: Parakeet TDT for English (under 50ms latency) or Whisper Large V3 for 99 languages. Optional AI cleanup runs locally via Qwen 2.5 by default, with no API call required.

When you dictate with Wispr Flow, your audio is transmitted to cloud servers. Alongside it, Wispr Flow captures screenshots of your active window every few seconds to provide context to the AI. Both audio and screenshots are processed using third-party AI providers — OpenAI and Meta's LLAMA 3.1.

On standard plans, audio and transcripts are retained for 30 days before automatic deletion. Privacy Mode, available on paid plans, offers zero data retention: data is processed and immediately discarded without storage.

Wispr Flow holds SOC 2 Type II certification and offers HIPAA compliance with a Business Associate Agreement. The company states that dictation data is never sold or shared with third parties.

For most personal use — drafting emails, writing notes, composing Slack messages — Wispr Flow's privacy posture is probably fine. For anyone handling genuinely sensitive information, the cloud architecture is a real concern.

Wispr Flow relies on cloud-based transcription, which means there's always a network round-trip. On a fast connection, this is mostly imperceptible. Where it shows up is on slow Wi-Fi, congested corporate networks, or when traveling.

Hearsy's Parakeet TDT processes English audio in under 50ms on Apple Silicon — local RAM-to-text with no network round-trip. No cloud service can beat local processing on latency. Whisper Large V3 in Hearsy takes around 1–2 seconds for a typical sentence, still local.

Wispr Flow has reported startup times of 8–10 seconds. Hearsy starts faster with the Parakeet model loading quickly at 1.2 GB RAM.