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If voice dictation is the only feature you need and you do not want to pay for it, Handy is a genuinely strong pick - especially given its $0 price, Linux support, and open-source transparency. Typilot wins when you want AI inline in every text field (commands, polish, autocomplete), when you need meeting recap with speaker labels, or when you want a polished commercial app with guided setup and support.
Think of it the other way around: Handy is the free raw-dictation baseline; Typilot is the paid option that adds the AI layer on top. Both run Whisper locally so audio never leaves your machine. Typilot adds inline AI commands, text polish, meetings, notes, and autocomplete that Handy does not have.
If raw voice-to-text is all you need, you might not need to. Typilot is for workflows that go beyond dictation: rewriting a paragraph in-place with a local AI model, running a meeting with automatic speaker labels, generating content from a voice prompt, or getting ghost-text suggestions in any editor. Those features have no equivalent in Handy.
Yes - Handy ships for macOS, Windows, and Linux with no account or setup required. Typilot also ships on Linux. Both are genuine options for Linux users who need local speech-to-text.
Yes - Handy processes audio entirely on your device using local Whisper or Parakeet models; no data leaves your machine. Typilot has the same guarantee: audio and text stay local via on-device Whisper and Ollama. Both pass the local-first privacy test.