u/Lovleyharvey

Human written:

I don't know exactly when it started. Maybe around covid, or during the ai boom, but I noticed I started speaking to real people the same way I speak to computers.

Transcription apps are so reliable now that I barely type anymore. I speak in messy first drafts, ums, repeated words, half finished thoughts. The software quietly cleans everything up, so on screen I appear to be a wordsmith. But in real conversations a cave man is mumbling something to himself. That's why I made this app to police me during transcriptions and meetings.

AI written overview:

How it actually works

Loorq isn't another dictation app. It runs alongside the one you already use and coaches you: while your dictation tool quietly deletes your "um"s (so you never learn you say them), Loorq makes them visible so you can drop the habit, and it coaches you live in meetings.

The pipeline is fully on-device:

- Mic audio lives in a RAM ring buffer and is never written to disk and never uploaded. Capture only starts on an explicit gesture (hold-to-dictate) or a session you start yourself. It listens to your own microphone only, never system audio or the other side of a call.

- Transcription runs locally (NVIDIA Parakeet via CoreML). Filler/pause detection is a small in-house CRNN plus Silero VAD, also local.

- Detection is precision-first by design: it undercounts on any ambiguity rather than risk flagging a real word as a filler. I'd rather miss one "like" than ever call your real word a crutch.

- Meeting coaching is counts only. It surfaces how often you hedged, never a transcript of what anyone said. Nothing from the other participants is stored or shown.

Every network connection it makes (run Little Snitch, this is the whole list):

1. First launch: one-time 461 MB download of the transcription model, from FluidInference's Parakeet v3 repository on Hugging Face.

2. License activation and weekly validation through Keygen (license key, random per-install ID, and Mac name; no speech data).

3. Sparkle update checks through GitHub.

That's it. No account, no telemetry on what you say, no analytics SDK.

Specs and limits, up front:

- macOS 15+, Apple Silicon only. Intel is not supported.

- English only for now.

- Around 150 MB RAM at rest, less than 1% idle CPU, and 461 MB for the model on disk.

- It's a speaking-habit coach, not a clinical tool. The research on our site is small public-speaking training studies, not trials of Loorq itself.

Price: $8 once (launch price, going to $15). Three-day full trial, no card, no account. Sold through Paddle, licensed through Keygen.

Why paid when Whispering / SuperWhisper are free: those are excellent *dictation* tools and Loorq doesn't try to beat them at that. The thing you're paying for is the coaching layer: real-time filler and crutch detection, the after-take verdict, and live meeting coaching. If all you want is transcription, keep the free tool. Loorq is for when you want to actually stop saying "um."

Happy to answer anything on the audio path, false positives, the detection model, or macOS support.