Hitoku Draft is a $5 open-source voice assistant that runs AI models entirely on your machine and uses screen context to understand what you're working on.
The developer released a compiled download for Mac and Windows, with a promo code currently dropping the price to free. It supports Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.5 for text generation and multiple speech-to-text backends, including Parakeet and Qwen3-ASR. The assistant reads your active app, open documents, and screen content — letting you dictate email replies, query PDFs, create calendar events, and edit text by voice. A cross-platform version is in development.
Local AI assistants have mostly lived in developer demos and command-line experiments, either too slow or too fiddly for everyday use. Hitoku Draft tries to close that gap by wrapping capable open models in a task-oriented interface rather than a chatbox. The developer acknowledges that adoption outside tech circles remains thin — which is either a real market gap or a sign that on-device models still can't reliably replace cloud-backed services for most people.
The Hacker News post earned five points and zero comments, a modest start for a tool competing with free voice assistants that already ship on every phone.