Local, GPU-accelerated voice dictation. Whisper runs on your hardware — no cloud, no subscription, no audio ever leaving your machine. Built for the platform the paid apps skipped: Linux. Now on Windows too.
Live preview
A minimal always-on-top card shows the transcription as it forms — and never steals focus from the window you're dictating into. Release the hotkey and a final, full-context pass is pasted at your cursor.
Faithful replica of the real overlay — matte, monochrome, focus-proof.
Features
A daemon keeps Whisper large-v3-turbo warm in VRAM: the text lands the moment
you stop speaking. No GPU? Automatic CPU fallback — slower, still private.
An on-screen card shows the transcription while you speak, refreshed every second — engineered so no compositor can hand it focus.
Dictating mid-call? Your mic stream to Discord is muted — the call never hears your prompts — and the call's audio is ducked so it stops derailing your sentence.
Dictate in whatever Whisper speaks. Feed your product names into the custom vocabulary and the decoder stops mangling them — it biases, never rewrites.
Pasted into the wrong window? Every dictation is kept locally — recover it with
voiceflow last --copy. Words per day, charts, a GitHub-style activity calendar.
The model, the audio, the history, the config — all on your disk. The only network call in the codebase is an optional once-a-day update check. That's it.
Why voiceflow
| voiceflow | typical paid dictation app | |
|---|---|---|
| price | free, MIT | ~$15/month |
| audio leaves your machine | never | always |
| Linux / GNOME / Wayland | native | unsupported |
| latency after you stop speaking | ~0.1 s on a GPU | network round-trip |
| works offline | yes | no |
| source code | all of it, on GitHub | closed |
Install
The installer sets up the environment, the hotkey, the background service, and downloads the speech model with a visible progress bar — when it says done, dictation works. Updating later? Run the same command again.
One step asks for sudo (input tooling + udev rule — the script explains why). Press Super + G, speak, press it again.
Prefer to read it first? View install.sh on GitHub.
Works in PowerShell and cmd, from any directory. Press Ctrl + Shift + Space, speak, press it again.
No terminal? Download the double-clickable installer:
voiceflow-install.batDetails, requirements and current limitations: README · Windows notes · all releases
Platforms
voiceflow stays free and open source — on every platform we can reach.
Good dictation shouldn't cost $15 a month or require shipping your voice to someone else's server. If you want it on your platform sooner, the issues above have implementation notes waiting — grab one, comment, and go. Contributions welcome.