Handy – Free open-source speech-to-text app written in Rust (handy.computer)

Handy is a new free, open-source speech-to-text app written in Rust that runs on your own computer. It provides a simple push-to-talk workflow (press-and-hold by default, or toggle mode) and maps to a customizable keyboard shortcut; when you speak it transcribes your audio and pastes the text directly into whatever text field you’re typing in. The demo shows a Mac menu-icon UI, but the core idea is a lightweight, single-purpose tool that stays local and unobtrusive. For the AI/ML community this matters for a few reasons: it foregrounds on-device transcription and privacy (audio never has to be sent to the cloud), lowers barriers for accessibility tooling by being free and open source, and offers a Rust codebase that’s amenable to performance-sensitive local inference or integration with offline speech models. Developers can extend or hook Handy into text workflows, experiment with different local STT backends, or use it as a privacy-first alternative to cloud paywalled services—making it a practical building block for accessible, offline voice interfaces.