Updated August 25, 2026 · By Sumbat.T

superwhisper and OpenSuperWhisper on Windows: What Actually Runs

For years, searching "superwhisper for Windows" turned up the same disappointing answer: there wasn't one. That changed in late 2025, when superwhisper shipped an official Windows app after a long beta. So if you landed here hoping to run superwhisper on your PC, the good news is you now can. The catch is that the Windows version is a lot younger than the Mac one that built the app's reputation, and that shows. This is an honest, side-by-side look at BlabbyAI versus superwhisper on Windows, so you can pick the right one.

What Are BlabbyAI and superwhisper?

Both are modern AI dictation tools that turn speech into text system-wide, with custom modes and local models. They are genuinely similar on paper. The difference that matters is which platform each was built for first.

superwhisper is a Mac-first AI dictation app (from Toronto-based SuperUltra) that launched around 2023 and quickly earned a strong reputation on macOS and iOS. It offers custom modes, on-device Whisper and Parakeet models, cloud models, AI post-processing, and transcription in 100+ languages. It announced a Windows beta in February 2025 and released an official Windows 1.0 in late November 2025.

BlabbyAI is AI dictation built for Windows first, on OpenAI's Whisper v3 Turbo. It works system-wide across every app, formats punctuation automatically, and adds custom AI modes you write yourself for cleanup, rewriting, and translation, plus snippets and custom words. It also ships a Chrome extension for browser-only situations. For the wider landscape, see our guide to the best voice typing software in 2026.

Built for Windows vs Ported to It

This is the heart of the comparison. superwhisper spent roughly two years as a Mac and iOS product before Windows arrived. The Mac app is the flagship: mature, polished, and well-reviewed, with users at large tech companies. That is a real endorsement, and if you are on a Mac, superwhisper is a strong pick.

The Windows app is a different story. It only reached 1.0 in late November 2025, so as of mid-2026 the Windows build is roughly nine months past its 1.0 against years of Mac maturity. You do not have to take a reviewer's word for what that gap looks like: superwhisper publishes a Windows-specific changelog, and reading it is the most honest way to judge the platform:

• Windows 1.0.0 shipped on 26 November 2025. The Mac app had been out for years by then, which is simply the order the company built things in.
• The Windows changelog is still moving quickly, reaching v1.5.10 by 10 August 2026. Frequent releases are a good sign of investment, and they also tell you the platform is still settling.
• Entries along the way record fixes for things like a recording window freezing on drag, the kind of platform-specific rough edge a younger build works through.
• Larger local models tuned for Apple Silicon that can lag on ordinary Windows laptops without unified memory.

None of this makes superwhisper on Windows unusable, and the team ships updates often, so the gaps are closing. But it does mean Windows users are running the newer, less-polished half of the product. BlabbyAI starts from the other side: it was designed for Windows 10 and 11 from the beginning, so there is no Mac-first baggage to inherit.

Accuracy: Both Run Modern Whisper Models

Here is a place where the two are genuinely close, and it is worth being fair about it. Both are built on modern Whisper-family speech models, so raw transcription quality is in the same league. superwhisper offers a range of local Whisper and Parakeet models plus cloud options. BlabbyAI runs on Whisper v3 Turbo.

For reference on the ceiling these models can hit, Whisper reached 97.93% word accuracy on clean LibriSpeech audio in MLCommons' 2025 benchmark (MLCommons, September 2025). Your real-world number depends on your microphone, accent, and surroundings. The practical wrinkle on Windows is not the model itself but the hardware: superwhisper's larger local models are tuned for Apple Silicon and can run slower on a typical Windows laptop, whereas BlabbyAI is targeted at Windows machines.

BlabbyAI vs superwhisper on Windows: Feature Comparison

The honest summary: on features, these two overlap a lot. The column that actually separates them for a Windows user is maturity and polish, where BlabbyAI is home and superwhisper is still catching up.

Custom Modes and Snippets on Windows

Both apps have custom modes, so the question is not whether the feature exists, but how well it is wired into Windows. In BlabbyAI, modes, snippets, and custom words are all first-class on your PC, not features that shipped later or landed lighter than the Mac equivalent.

A few things you can set up in BlabbyAI in seconds:

• Translate as you speak: talk in your language, get clean English (or another language) out.
• Match a format: "turn this into a bulleted summary," or "write it as a short, professional email."
• Keep it raw: exact words, no cleanup, ideal for LLM prompts and code.
• Snippets: say "my email" and it types your real email address, so you never read personal details aloud.

Pricing: Effectively a Tie

This is not where the decision gets made. superwhisper publishes a free tier and a paid Pro plan billed monthly, yearly, or as a one-time lifetime licence, with Pro monthly at $8.49, read from the price element on its own site. BlabbyAI is free to start, and unlimited Windows use is $8.49/month with the ongoing Windows discount. Call that parity: the monthly numbers are close enough that cost is not the deciding factor, so choose on platform fit instead. Check superwhisper's own pricing page for its current exact figures before you compare, since third-party blogs quoting its prices frequently disagree with each other.

"OpenSuperWhisper for Windows" is a different thing, and it is mostly a dead end

A lot of people searching for superwhisper on Windows are actually typing OpenSuperWhisper, or they land on it after a search and assume it is the free, open-source version of the same app. It is not. OpenSuperWhisper is an unrelated open-source project that happens to share most of a name, and if you are on Windows the distinction matters more than almost anything else on this page. Here is the part nobody says plainly: there are two different GitHub projects called OpenSuperWhisper, and neither one gives a Windows user what they are looking for.

The popular one has never had a Windows build

The OpenSuperWhisper people mean when they recommend it is Starmel/OpenSuperWhisper. It is a genuinely nice project: MIT licensed, free, actively maintained, and it runs Whisper and Parakeet models locally with a global hotkey and hold-to-record. It is also macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon only. Not "Windows support is coming", not "build it from source": the only release asset is a .dmg, and it will not even run on an Intel Mac, let alone a PC. If a forum post or an AI answer told you to grab OpenSuperWhisper for your Windows machine, that recommendation was wrong.

The two with a Windows download both need a paid API key

Two OpenSuperWhisper projects ship a Windows build, and both are different pieces of software by different authors that reuse the name. The one Google's own AI Overview cites is TakanariShimbo/open-super-whisper, a Python app with 31 stars and no commits since April 2025. The other, Yutaishy/OpenSuperWhisper, has one star and was last pushed in August 2025.

The detail that matters is the same for both, and it is the opposite of what the name promises: neither transcribes locally. TakanariShimbo's README lists "OpenAI API key" under Requirements in as many words, and Yutaishy's sends your audio to the OpenAI Whisper API using a key you supply and pay for. So the thing people usually want from an open-source Whisper tool, private on-device transcription at no cost, is precisely what the Windows builds do not do. For scale, the Mac-only Starmel release has been downloaded 19,135 times; the Windows zip from Yutaishy shows 18.

Put those together and the Windows picture is blunt: there is no free, local, actively maintained "OpenSuperWhisper" for Windows. The good one is Mac-only and the two that build for Windows are stale and cloud-based. That is not a knock on any of the authors, all three are hobby projects doing what they set out to do, but it does mean a Windows user following this trail ends up installing a repo nobody has touched since 2025, wiring up a paid API key, and still not having a dictation tool that works everywhere they type.

This is the gap BlabbyAI was built for. You install a normal Windows app, press a hotkey, and speak into whatever already has your cursor in it: Word, Outlook, Slack, Teams, Notion, your browser, your IDE. Transcription runs on Whisper v3 Turbo, there is no API key to manage and no per-word billing, and the free tier is a real one you can use without a card. If what attracted you to OpenSuperWhisper was "Whisper-quality dictation on Windows without a subscription to start", that is available today, and it is maintained.

One honest caveat, since this section is about being accurate: if you specifically want to read and modify the source of your dictation tool, BlabbyAI is not open source and will not satisfy that. On Windows your realistic open-source route is running a Whisper front-end yourself rather than either OpenSuperWhisper. For everyone whose actual goal is to stop typing, a maintained app is the shorter path.

Moving from a Mac dictation habit to Windows

A specific person keeps arriving at this page: someone who used superwhisper happily on a Mac, changed jobs or machines, and now has a Windows laptop and a dictation habit they do not want to lose. If that is you, the switch is smaller than it looks, but two expectations are worth resetting up front.

Your hotkey muscle memory transfers, your modifier keys do not

The push-to-talk loop is the same everywhere: hold a key, talk, release, watch text land at the cursor. What changes is the key itself. Mac dictation tools lean on Command and the Fn key, and Windows has no Command key at all, so whatever you had trained your thumb to do needs remapping to Ctrl, Alt, or a spare key. Set that once, deliberately, on day one. People who skip it spend a week half-reaching for a key that does not exist and conclude dictation feels worse on Windows, when what actually feels worse is an unset shortcut. BlabbyAI lets you pick the trigger, so choose something your hand already knows.

Rebuild your custom words before you judge accuracy

This is the single most common reason a switch feels like a downgrade. Any dictation tool you have used for months has quietly accumulated your vocabulary: colleagues' names, your product names, the acronyms your team throws around, the client whose spelling nothing guesses right. None of that follows you across apps. So on a fresh install the engine is not less accurate, it just has not been told about your world yet. Spend ten minutes adding your twenty worst offenders to custom words on the first day rather than deciding after three frustrating emails that the transcription is bad. BlabbyAI supports custom words and snippets for exactly this, and the payoff per minute spent is higher than any other setting on the page.

Rebuild one mode, not all of them

If you had a stack of superwhisper modes on the Mac, resist porting the whole set. Most people genuinely use one or two. Start with the mode you reached for daily, usually something that turns loose speech into a clean, punctuated message, get it right, and add others only when you actually miss them. BlabbyAI modes are written as plain instructions in your own words rather than assembled from a settings panel, so recreating a favourite is usually a couple of sentences describing what you want done to the text you speak.

Do those three things and the honest answer is that a Windows dictation setup lands very close to what you left behind on the Mac, because the hard part was never the operating system. It was the hotkey, the vocabulary, and the one mode you actually use.

Which Should You Choose?

On a Mac, superwhisper is a genuinely great tool and an easy recommendation. On Windows, the decision is closer, and it comes down to whether you want the app that treats Windows as its home or the one still catching Windows up to its Mac version. Both start free, so on Windows the low-risk move is to try BlabbyAI first.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

superwhisper is no longer "Mac-only," and on the Mac it is a polished, mature, genuinely excellent dictation app. Its Windows version is real and improving, but it is young: 1.0.0 landed in November 2025 and its own changelog was still shipping fixes through v1.5.10 in August 2026, against years of Mac maturity, with local models tuned for Apple Silicon. BlabbyAI is built for Windows from the start, runs on Whisper v3 Turbo, dictates system-wide into every app, and makes custom modes, snippets, and custom words first-class on your OS, with a Chrome extension for the times you cannot install a desktop app. Pricing is a wash. If Windows is where you work, start free with BlabbyAI and let your own results make the case.