Zeltro › A Wispr Flow alternative for dictating to your AI coding agent

Zeltro as a Wispr Flow alternative for vibe coding

Wispr Flow sends every word you say to the cloud and trains on it by default on its Free and Pro plans. Zeltro dictates to your AI agent with Whisper running on your own computer, offline, with no word limit and no subscription. What differs, and why vibe coders switch.

Wispr Flow (often searched as "Whisper Flow") is a voice dictation app: you talk, and it types for you in whatever app you are using. Plenty of developers use it to talk to Cursor, Claude Code or ChatGPT instead of typing long prompts, and it is good at that.

The catch is where your voice goes. Wispr's own data page says it plainly: "Transcription always occurs on the cloud." If you mainly dictate to an AI coding agent, Zeltro gives you that on your own computer, with nothing uploaded and nothing to pay for.

Wispr Flow and Zeltro side by side#

As of September 2026:

Where your voice goes with Wispr Flow#

Wispr is open about this, and its own help pages are worth reading before you dictate anything private.

• Everything is transcribed in the cloud. "Wispr Flow is a cloud service rather than an on-premise deployment. The service processes and stores customer data in the United States." Its security FAQ adds that "it is not end-to-end encrypted in the strict sense."
• It reads the screen around you. "Wispr always uses information about the app you are dictating in (e.g. app name)… It also takes into account the surrounding textbox content." An optional Context Awareness setting sends "relevant text data from the active app window."
• Training is on unless you switch it off. "'Improve the model for everyone' is on by default for Free and Pro… and you can turn it off." When it is on, Wispr uses your "audio, transcript, edits." Only Enterprise has training locked off.
• Some of it is always collected. Usage statistics are gathered "regardless of your data controls," and signing out "resets the Dictation Cloud Storage preference to enabled."
• Third parties are involved. Its privacy policy mentions "third-party LLM providers," without naming them publicly.

How dictation works in Zeltro#

Zeltro puts a microphone button on the message box you use to talk to your AI agent. Press it, say what you want changed, and your words land in the box. Tidy them up if you like, then send them to the agent working in that project.

• Speech recognition runs on your computer. Zeltro uses Whisper, the open-source model OpenAI released, running locally. No audio is uploaded.
• It works offline. The model downloads once, the first time you dictate, and after that it needs no connection.
• You pick the trade. A faster model (about 180 MB) or a more accurate one (about 550 MB), in English or multilingual.
• No word counts, no subscription, no account. It is part of the Zeltro app, which is free for personal use.
• It sits next to the work. The message box belongs to a project, so what you say goes to the agent that is already working in that project's code, with its files and database right there.

Before you switch#

• Wispr Flow types into any app. Zeltro's dictation lives in its own message box, built for talking to your AI agent. If you want to dictate emails and Slack messages too, Wispr does more; for prompting a coding agent, Zeltro does it without the cloud.
• Wispr has phone apps. Zeltro runs on your computer. Most coding happens there anyway.
• Wispr has IDE tricks. It tags files in Cursor and Windsurf chat panels and recognises variable names. In Zeltro, the agent already works inside the project folder, so you can name a file and it finds it.

Why people switch to Zeltro#

• They do not want every word they say sent to a cloud service and, by default, used for training.
• They are on Linux, which Wispr Flow does not support.
• They want dictation that keeps working offline and never runs into a weekly word limit.
• They already talk to an AI agent all day, and would rather have the agent, the projects and the dictation in one app, with the AI they already pay for.

Sources#

Checked on 29 September 2026: Wispr Flow's pricing, data controls, privacy policy, privacy mode and cloud sync, security and compliance FAQ, supported devices, retrying failed transcriptions, IDE and developer pages. Plans and terms change, so check them before you commit.

Questions

Checked 2026-09-29. Other products change often — if something here is out of date, tell us and it gets fixed.