On Air
On Air is a tasteful, free-forever alternative to Wispr Flow, built and operated by Dan Barclay for developers who want to ramp up their AI-driven coding throughput with voice transcription. Hold fn, speak, and let go - the transcript lands in whatever text field you were typing in, from an agent prompt to your editor or terminal. No windows, menus or timers: a soft red glow tells you it's listening.
Problem
Speaking is faster than typing, and when you're steering AI coding agents all day, typing out prompts is the bottleneck. But most dictation tools put something between you and your words - a floating window, a menu, a timer, a monthly subscription. Then they paste into the wrong place, or quietly overwrite whatever was on your clipboard.
Solution
Hold fn and speak. Audio streams to OpenAI's live transcription while a red glow rises with your voice. Let go, a blue line shows it finishing, and the text is pasted into the field you started in. If focus has moved, it waits in the menu bar to copy instead. Your clipboard is restored, audio never touches the disk, and it's free forever - no subscription, just your own OpenAI key.
Stack
- · Swift 6 · SwiftUI · native menu-bar app
- · OpenAI live transcription, your own key in Keychain
- · Developer ID signed and notarized
- · Site on Remix 3 · Cloudflare Workers
Author
Dan Barclay is an engineering leader based in London. On Air - a free-forever Wispr Flow alternative for Mac - is one of four products he is focused on building. The others are Promptly, the CMS powering the next wave of AI development, KeepFresh, an iOS app working to end food waste for good, and Stitch, a free web app that combines split Strava rides into one activity.