You can know exactly what you want from an AI assistant and still spend time turning that thought into a clear prompt. The context, constraints, and desired output all need to make it onto the page.
OpenLess is an open-source voice-input project built around that step: speak your request, have the text organized, and place it at your cursor.
The workflow
Place your cursor in a text field, hold a global hotkey, and speak. OpenLess records the audio, transcribes it, polishes the text in the selected style, and inserts the result at the cursor. When insertion is blocked, it falls back to copying the text to the clipboard.
The useful distinction is its AI-prompt mode. Instead of treating speech only as a word-for-word transcript, this mode organizes spoken background, requirements, and constraints into a structured prompt for tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor.
For example, a spoken request might include a task, the intended audience, a tone, and several things to avoid. Keeping those details together in a clear prompt is the goal. OpenLess does not answer the request or execute it; that remains the job of the AI tool you choose next.
Beyond prompts
The same workflow can help with drafting emails, requirements, long messages, code comments, commit messages, and PR descriptions. You can customize writing styles through style packs and configure your own speech-recognition and text-polishing providers.
Provider choice is part of the setup. When you select cloud services, those services process the audio or text involved in their respective steps. Open source does not, by itself, mean every configuration runs entirely offline.
Try it and share a concrete example
The code and setup instructions are available on GitHub:
https://github.com/Open-Less/openless
If you try OpenLess, feedback about a specific workflow is especially useful: what you said, how the text was organized, and what you wanted to change. Share issues or suggestions in the project repository.
Which input would you most like to speak instead of type: an AI prompt, an email, or a technical specification?
Source: the project's README. Prepared with AI assistance.
