u/EfficientLetter3654

A few days ago I posted here about Vox, a free voice-to-text app I built because I refused to pay for Wispr Flow. The response was way more than I expected – bug reports, feature requests, people asking what's next.

So now I want to be honest about what Vox actually is: the first piece of something bigger. And I want to ask whether the bigger thing sounds like a good idea or whether I'm losing it.

The idea

For something as important as your career – your income, your time, your sanity – the tools are kind of embarrassing. The job search runs on ATS(Applicant Tracking Systems) keyword bingo. Most people never negotiate their first offer and leave 7-15% on the table forever (and every future raise compounds off that base). Daily knowledge work is still mostly typing things humans shouldn't be typing. And when review season comes around, most contributors can't actually articulate the business value of their own year.

Meanwhile the people who win at this – the offers, the raises, the promotions – mostly win because they had informal access to someone who told them how it actually works.

I want to build that "someone" as software. One focused app per problem, all sharing the same profile that gets more valuable the longer you use it.

I'm calling it Rizen. Three pillars, 14 apps total:

• Get Hired – resume engine written from your actual wins, offer negotiator, interview rehearsal, application tracker
• Get Productive – Vox (live), a spatial canvas for ideas called Mind, meeting intelligence, a daily journal of wins
• Get Promoted – career planner, raise/promotion negotiator, skill-gap analyzer, relationship CRM, comp tracking, review packet generator

Vox is #1 and it's live. Mind is next.

Full details if you're curious: https://rizenhq.com/

The "am I crazy" part

When I write it out like that it sounds insane. 14 apps. One person. I know.

The thing that makes me think it's actually doable is that they all sit on the same underlying profile – your wins, your skills, your roles, your network. So building app #5 isn't really building app #5 from scratch, it's adding a new view on data the previous four already created. And each individual app is a normal-sized side project, not a moonshot.

Still. It's a lot. So:

The ask

• Does this resonate at all, or does it sound like LinkedIn-bro vaporware?
• Which app would you actually want first? (If enough people say the same one, I'll move it up the list.)
• What's the thing about job search / work / promotions that quietly makes you the most furious? I want to build for problems that actually hurt, not the ones that are easy to describe on a landing page.
• Anyone tried to build something at this scope and got slapped down by reality? I'd genuinely like to hear why before I find out the hard way.

On money, since I want to be upfront

I do eventually want to earn from this – I'm not pretending otherwise. The plan is a paid Suite for the people who get a lot of value out of it, and a generous free tier so that anyone who can't afford it (students, people between jobs, anyone in a rough spot) can still use the parts that matter most. Vox itself is free for personal use forever, no signup, no account. That's the tone I want to keep across the whole thing.

In a year where the job market is what it is and AI is eating roles people thought were safe, I want the tools that help individuals to actually be on the side of the individual. I don't think that has to be a charity to be true.

Anyway – tell me I'm crazy, or tell me what to build first.

I spend most of my day writing prompts to Claude. Read a study recently that said people speak ~3x faster than they type, which lands differently when "writing" is basically your whole workflow.

Looked at Wispr Flow – it's genuinely great, but $15/month forever for something I'd mostly use to dictate to Claude felt wrong. So I spent two weeks of evenings building my own with Claude Code.

How Claude helped

I'd never shipped a Tauri / macOS app before this. Claude Code did the bulk of the actual code:

• The menu bar app structure, global hotkey capture, and paste-anywhere flow
• UI and onboarding
• Integrating the local model runtimes (Parakeet / Whisper for transcription, Gemma 4 for polishing)
• The model download / storage logic so the app ships without bundling gigabytes of weights
• A lot of debugging I would not have had the patience for on my own

I made the product and design calls; Claude wrote the vast majority of the code. Two weeks of evenings, usually an hour or two at a time.

What it does

Menu bar app for macOS. Hold a hotkey, talk, release – text is copied to your clipboard. Works in any app: Claude.ai, Cursor, Slack, browser, IDE, whatever.

Two open-source models doing the work:

• Parakeet (NVIDIA) / Whisper for transcription
• Gemma 4 (Google) / Apple Intelligence for polishing the raw transcript into something readable

Everything runs locally. No cloud calls, no API keys, no telemetry, no account. Fully offline after download.

Free for personal use, no signup. Download: https://vox.rizenhq.com/

Caveats

1. macOS only. Apple Silicon required (M-series chip). Windows build is next.
2. It's two weeks old. Bugs I haven't found yet exist.
3. ~90% of Wispr Flow's quality, not 100%. Enough for me to use every day.

What it's saving me

40–60 minutes a day, mostly on prompts. Dictating to Claude feels noticeably more natural than typing to it.

The ask

Feedback, especially from people who talk to Claude a lot:

• Where does it break? Bug reports > compliments.
• What did you use it with?
• What feature would make you switch from Wispr Flow (or start using voice-to-text at all)?

Tech notes

• No separate model download – onboarding handles it
• Gemma 4 options: E2B, E4B, 26B. E2B runs on phones; 26B is overkill for most machines. I use E4B – great quality, fast.
• RAM (Parakeet + Gemma 4 E4B): ~200mb idle, ~300mb while speaking, brief spike to 4–6GB during transcription/polish, then back to 200mb
• CPU: ~0% idle, ~20% peak during use

EDIT

BTW, I develop it during my live streams from 8:30 am to 10:30 am ET everyday here. I show the code and decisions I make live on the stream. If you want to ask questions / push for some features / push to make it open source / etc. - join the stream, push for it in the chat and I'll consider it!

Also, seeing the number of feedback, and feature requests in the comments I've decided to create a discord server to make sure that nothing will be lost and everything will be addressed. You can join here.

Two weeks ago I read a study that said people speak about 3x faster than they type. One of those things you've sort of always known but never actually sat with.

So I started looking at voice-to-text apps. Wispr Flow is the obvious pick and it's genuinely good. But $15/month forever for something I'd mostly use to dictate prompts to an LLM felt like a personal insult. I already pay for too many subscriptions.

So instead of doing the rational thing (paying $15), I spent two weeks of evenings rebuilding it. The math obviously doesn't work. But yeah....

What it is

A menu bar app for macOS. You hold a hotkey, talk, release, and the transcribed + polished text gets pasted wherever your cursor is. Works in any app – Slack, browser, IDE, ChatGPT, whatever.

Two open-source models doing the work:

- Parakeet (NVIDIA) / Whisper for transcription

- Gemma 4 (Google) / Apple Intelligence for polishing the raw transcript into something readable

Everything runs locally. No cloud calls, no API keys, no telemetry, no account. Once it's downloaded it works fully offline.

Caveats, in order of importance

1. macOS only. Apple Silicon required (M Series chip). Sorry to Intel Mac and Windows folks – Windows build is next on the list.
2. It's two weeks old. I'd love to say there are no bugs, but I'm a realist. There are bugs I didn't find yet. There will be more bugs...
3. I'd estimate it's at ~90% of Wispr Flow's quality. Not 100%. For me personally, it's enough to use it every day.

What it's saving me

40–60 minutes a day, mostly because I write a lot of prompts. Talking to an LLM feels more natural than typing to one. If you write a lot of emails/docs, the savings are probably bigger.

Download: vox.rizenhq.com (free for personal use, no signup)

The ask

I'm genuinely trying to figure out who this is for besides me. If you try it:

- Tell me where it breaks. I want bug reports more than compliments.

- Tell me what app/workflow you tried it in. I'm trying to understand the actual use cases.

- If there's a feature that would make you switch from Wispr Flow (or start using voice-to-text at all), let me know.

EDIT:

If you see any bugs or want to suggest features - create an issue here.

EDIT 2 (some technical specs, resource consumption, etc.):

1. No need to download AI models separately. App will ask to click "Download" during the onboarding flow and will do everything for you.
2. Gemma 4 models available - E2B, E4B, and 26B. E2B is very small, it'll run even on mobile phones. 26B is honestly too big and usable only by really high-end devices. I personally always use E4B - It has an amazing quality for the purpose of this app and works really fast.

Regarding resource consumption:

1. RAM - approximately 200mb when app is not in use. When you are speaking - approximately 300mb in total. Transcription and Polishing phase - brief spike to 4-6GB for a couple of seconds and then after it's done back to 200mb
2. CPU - when app is not in use, basically 0. When it's in use the biggest spike I saw in Activity Monitor - 20%

EDIT 3

Is it open source? Not right now. I'm considering making it open source though.

BTW, I develop it during my live streams from 8:30 am to 10:30 am ET everyday here. I show the code and decisions I make live on the stream. If you want to ask questions / push for some features / push to make it open source / etc. - join the stream, push it in the chat and I'll consider it!

EDIT 4

Seeing the number of feedback, and feature requests in the comments I've decided to create a discord server to make sure that nothing will be lost and everything will be addressed. You can join here.