---
title: "Ghost Pepper Wins for Dictation"
description: "I was wrong about Aqua Voice being the ceiling for fast dictation. Ghost Pepper is fantastic, and my Aqua subscription is cancelled. It's free, MIT-licensed, 100% local (WhisperKit plus a small Qwen model for cleanup), and astoundingly fast on Apple Silicon."
url: https://ai.statico.io/2026/05/28/ghost-pepper-wins-for-dictation/
canonical: https://ai.statico.io/2026/05/28/ghost-pepper-wins-for-dictation/
date: 2026-05-28T17:40:15.000Z
last_updated: 2026-05-28T17:40:15.000Z
doc_version: 2026-05-28
tags: ["aqua-voice", "dictation", "ghost-pepper", "local-first", "macos", "open-source", "tooling", "voice-input"]
ai_disclosure: ai-assisted
---

# Ghost Pepper Wins for Dictation

I was wrong about [Aqua Voice](https://ai.statico.io) being the ceiling for fast dictation. [Ghost Pepper](https://github.com/matthartman/ghost-pepper) is fantastic, and my Aqua subscription is cancelled. It's free, MIT-licensed, 100% local (WhisperKit plus a small Qwen model for cleanup), and astoundingly fast on Apple Silicon.

The measure that matters is developer-speak. Saying "tilde slash dev" should produce `~/dev`. Saying "eich mack or jay double-you tee" should produce "HMAC or JWT". Ghost Pepper gets both right, every time.

![Ghost Pepper Settings window showing Models tab with language auto-detect, cleanup model selection, and list of available speech recognition runtime models with file sizes](/media/1779990080881-ef6df6157f665710.png)

## Key bindings

The defaults ship as hold-Control to talk, but my muscle memory is from Aqua: right Option as push-to-talk. Reusing those keys worked fine. Aqua's double-tap-to-go-hands-free mode is the one feature I miss, and Ghost Pepper doesn't have it yet, so Shift+RightOpt is standing in. On my Keychron K2 the M1 macro key handles it nicely. Might take a swing at adding the double-tap toggle upstream.

## The cleanup model is a little too honest

Aqua quietly filtered out coughs, keyboard noise, and other non-speech. Ghost Pepper does not. `[keyboard clacking]` and `[snorts]` have both shown up in my output, courtesy of Whisper's annotation habit leaking through the cleanup pass. Guess I'll have to be a little more civilized at the desk.

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