AI tool comparison
MiniAi vs Stet
Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.
Productivity
MiniAi
Select any text on Mac, press ⌥Space, get AI in a floating panel
75%
Panel ship
—
Community
Free
Entry
MiniAi is a macOS menu bar app with exactly one job: explain selected text without breaking your focus. Highlight any text on your Mac — in a PDF, email, code file, web page, or document — press Option+Space, and a floating AI explanation panel appears. No app switching, no copy-paste, no context loss. Built by a medical student who needed to stay in reading flow while looking up terms in research papers, MiniAi uses Claude Haiku under the hood for fast, accurate explanations. The floating panel dismisses with Escape and leaves no trace in your task switcher. The scope is deliberately minimal: one gesture, one action, instant result. No chat history, no threads, no settings overwhelm. Free to use with your own Anthropic API key. Launched today on Product Hunt where it resonated strongly with students, researchers, and professionals who live in document-heavy workflows.
Productivity
Stet
Local macOS dictation that sounds like you — not like generic AI prose
75%
Panel ship
—
Community
Free
Entry
Stet is an open-source macOS dictation app that transcribes speech locally and then uses AI to clean up the output while actively preserving your personal writing style and tone. The core innovation is a voice model — a lightweight profile that learns from your past writing so the AI corrections don't flatten your voice into generic AI-ese. The result is meant to sound like you dictated it, not like it was passed through a generic LLM. The technical approach combines local Whisper-based transcription (nothing leaves your device during speech-to-text) with an optional AI refinement pass that can use your own API key (BYOK) or a $6.99/month subscription. The open-source release includes the voice profiling code, making it auditable and forkable. It's a direct response to Wispr Flow, which is closed-source and subscription-only. For writers, podcasters, and productivity users who dictate significant amounts of content, the voice preservation angle is genuinely differentiated. The proliferation of AI writing tools has created a recognizable 'AI voice' — flat, over-structured, and devoid of personality — that sophisticated readers are increasingly adept at detecting. Stet's bet is that preserving your actual voice is the most valuable thing an AI writing assistant can do.
Reviewer scorecard
“The Option+Space shortcut is muscle memory within 10 minutes. BYOK with Haiku means it's essentially free at typical usage — Haiku is fast and accurate enough for term lookups and quick explanations. The zero-UI-overhead philosophy is exactly right for a tool you invoke 20 times a day.”
“Open-source, local-first transcription with BYOK is the right architecture. I've been burned by voice tools that upload my audio to servers I can't audit. The voice profile approach for preserving style is technically interesting — I want to see how it handles domain-specific jargon and code-switching between formal and casual registers.”
“Apple's own Writing Tools in macOS 15 already has a 'Summarize' action in the right-click menu, and it's free with no API key. PopClip has been doing triggered text actions for a decade with a rich ecosystem of extensions. MiniAi needs a clearer differentiator beyond the keyboard shortcut.”
“The 'sounds like you' promise needs a lot of data to actually deliver — your voice profile is only as good as the writing samples it's trained on, and most people don't have a consistent, large corpus of their own writing. For casual dictators, this might just be Whisper with extra steps. Apple's built-in dictation is free and surprisingly good now.”
“Tools like MiniAi are training users to expect ambient AI assistance — intelligence available at any moment without mode-switching. This behavioral shift is significant: once people get used to instant contextual explanation, the bar for every reading and research tool permanently rises.”
“Voice-first computing is coming back, and the arms race for authentic AI writing assistance is heating up. The distinguishing factor won't be transcription accuracy — everyone has solved that — it will be voice fidelity. Stet is building in the right direction: local processing plus personal style models. Expect this architecture to be standard in two years.”
“The story behind MiniAi — built by a med student to stay in flow during paper reading — is authentic and the design reflects genuine user empathy. For writers, researchers, and anyone working with dense material, this is the kind of tool you install and forget you installed because it just works.”
“This is genuinely exciting for writers and content creators. The homogenization of AI-assisted writing is a real aesthetic problem — everything starts sounding like the same LinkedIn post. A tool that actively fights that tendency by learning your specific voice is solving the right problem. Even if the voice model needs work, the direction is exactly right.”
Weekly AI Tool Verdicts
Get the next comparison in your inbox
New AI tools ship daily. We compare them before you waste an afternoon.