uvx local-stt

Why local-stt

• Free forever. MIT licensed open source. No trial, no paid tier, no usage limits.
• Private by design. Your voice is turned into text on your own computer. Audio never leaves your device and is never written to disk.
• Works offline. After a one-time model download, dictation never needs the internet.
• Push-to-talk voice typing everywhere. Mail, Slack, docs, your code editor, the browser: if it has a text cursor, local-stt can type into it.
• Speaks your language. Dictate in English or Hindi (and the other languages Whisper knows). By default everything comes out as English text.
• Small and fast. The default model is 181 MB. On an Apple M4 Pro a short sentence comes back in about half a second.
• Hands-free when you want it. Hold to talk, or press a second shortcut to keep listening while you think out loud.
• Live preview, tidy result. See your words as you speak; Smart formatting turns "point one, point two" (or "number one", "first, second") into a numbered list.
• No telemetry. No analytics, no crash reporting, no account. The only optional ping is a once-a-day version check you can switch off.

How it works

1. Hold Fn + Shift on a Mac, or Ctrl + Alt on Windows. Change it any time in Settings.
2. Speak. A small glass recording pill shows a red dot and your live microphone level, with a live preview of your words above it.
3. Let go. Your words are transcribed on your laptop, tidied, copied to the clipboard and pasted where your cursor is.

Hands-free: press Fn + Shift + Space (Windows: Ctrl + Alt + Space) to start listening, and press it again to stop. Already holding push-to-talk? Add Space to switch to hands-free without stopping. Esc cancels either way. A single recording stops and pastes after 5 minutes.

Every dictation is kept in a local history you can search and copy from. Click Select to tick the ones you no longer need (one, a whole day, or all of them) and delete them, or switch history off.

Under the hood: a Rust app built with Tauri. A keyboard hook spots your shortcut, the microphone is recorded in memory, Whisper (whisper.cpp) turns it into text on your computer, simple rules tidy it, and the app pastes it. The full tour, written for newcomers, is in docs/architecture.md.

Get started

Requirements

macOS

Open Terminal and run:

brew install uv        # once; without Homebrew, see the uv link above
uvx local-stt          # installs local-stt in Applications and opens it

Windows

Open PowerShell and run:

winget install --id=astral-sh.uv -e   # once
# close PowerShell and open a new one, so the uv command is found
uvx local-stt                          # installs local-stt in the Start menu and opens it

Linux

More commands

uvx local-stt install        # install without opening
local-stt --autostart on     # start it when you log in
uvx local-stt demo           # a 30-second tour with sample data; nothing is recorded or pasted
local-stt --help             # every command

Started from a terminal, local-stt runs as its own app, not as part of the terminal: you can close the terminal, and macOS asks for permissions in local-stt's name. On first start it downloads the default speech model (181 MB, checked against a pinned SHA-256 checksum) and puts a microphone icon in your menu bar or system tray. Settings > General > Install does the same as install, and turning on Start at login installs it first if needed.

First run

A short setup opens the first time, about a minute:

1. Welcome: what should local-stt call you (optional, stays on your computer).
2. System check: your computer, the speech model that fits it, microphones, permissions, and the model download, each ticked off as it really finishes.
3. Recommended or Customize: the recommended settings work for most people; Customize shows the shortcut, language, paste, smart formatting, history and start at login.
4. Permissions: a microphone test and, on macOS, Accessibility.
5. Try it: hold the shortcut and watch your words appear.

Every step can be skipped, and Settings > General > Run Setup Again brings it back.

Permissions on macOS

macOS asks for two permissions, in local-stt's name. Both are needed and both stay on your Mac:

• Microphone: to hear you while you hold the shortcut.
• Accessibility: to notice the shortcut and to paste the text for you.

If the emoji picker opens when you press Fn, set System Settings > Keyboard > Press fn key to "Do Nothing".

Meeting notes

Open the Notes tab (or New Note in the menu bar or tray) when a call starts. local-stt records your microphone as Me and what your computer plays as Others, and turns both into a transcript on your computer while the call runs. Click Stop and the note is tidied: "uh" and "um" go, spacing is fixed, spoken lists are numbered, and back-to-back lines from one side are joined.

• Works with Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack, or any app that plays sound. No bot joins the call.
• Audio is never saved. Each few seconds of speech is transcribed and then dropped.
• Notes stay on your computer. Rename, copy or delete them; Select deletes several at once.
• Use headphones for the cleanest split; with speakers your own words can echo into Others, and local-stt drops lines that repeat.
• macOS 14.6 or later (macOS asks once for System Audio Recording), or Windows 10 and 11.

Consent. Recording other people is regulated: several US states and many countries need everyone's consent. local-stt shows a reminder the first time and gives you a line to paste in the meeting chat. This is not legal advice.

Coming next: a prompt when a call starts, a local meeting summary, and telling speakers apart.

Insights

The Insights tab shows how dictation is going, kindly and privately:

• Workday streak: days in a row with at least one dictation, Monday to Friday only. Weekends never count and never break it.
• Streak freezes: you start with 5. A missed workday spends one by itself, and every 10 active workdays earns one more (10 at most). When none are left the streak starts again; your longest streak is kept.
• Words and speed: words today, this week and in all, words per minute, and an estimate of the time saved against typing at 40 words a minute.
• When you dictate: words by hour of the day.
• Your words (English): the nouns and verbs you use most and the mix of word types. It is approximate. Turn Word insights off and those counts are deleted.
• Milestones at 1,000 words and up.

Insights keep totals only (counts per day, the 200 words you use most), never sentences. They stay on your computer, keep counting when history is off, and Reset Insights deletes them.

Settings

Open the app from the menu bar or tray icon.

The recording pill shows on the screen you are typing on. Drag it anywhere: it snaps to corners and edges and keeps that spot, in proportion, on every screen.

Models

local-stt checks your computer (memory, processor, graphics, free disk) and only offers models that will run well on it. The best fit is marked Recommended; models that will not run well are greyed out with the reason.

Run local-stt doctor to see your hardware and which models fit, right in the terminal.

Languages

Speak in any of 99 languages and get English text, ready to paste into Claude, ChatGPT or any other AI assistant. Or keep the language you spoke.

• Indian and South Asian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Urdu, Assamese, Nepali, Sindhi, Sanskrit and Sinhala.
• Also: English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Swahili and more. The full list is under Settings > Spoken language, which detects the language by itself unless you pick one.
• Every model speaks every language. Whisper Small, Medium and Large v3 all handle all 99; the larger models are more accurate, especially for languages with less training data.
• Translation goes into English only. That is how Whisper is built.

Privacy and security

• Speech recognition runs locally with whisper.cpp. Audio stays in memory and is discarded after each dictation.
• The app talks to the network for three things only: downloading a model from Hugging Face over HTTPS (verified against a pinned checksum on download and again when it loads); a once-a-day version check against pypi.org that sends nothing but the request itself (you can turn it off); and, only when you click Install and Restart, uv fetching the new release from PyPI.
• Text is put on the clipboard marked as private, so clipboard managers, Windows clipboard history and cloud clipboard skip it. On a Mac with Handoff on, Universal Clipboard can still pass it to your own nearby devices.
• The shortcut listener only checks whether your chosen combo is held. It never records or stores any other keys.
• The troubleshooting log records events such as "recording stopped: 4.2 s" or "paste blocked", never what you said, audio, key presses, clipboard contents or microphone names. It stays on your computer; turning it off deletes it.
• Meeting notes record what your computer plays only between New Note and Stop. Audio is never written to disk; notes are local files readable only by your user account.
• Insights keep daily counts and your most used words, never sentences; Reset Insights deletes them.
• History and settings are plain local files readable only by your user account. History can be switched off, cleared, or trimmed to the dictations you pick, at any time.
• Releases are built in GitHub Actions, published with PyPI Trusted Publishing and carry build provenance attestations.

See SECURITY.md to report a vulnerability privately.

FAQ

Is it really free? Yes. MIT licensed, no paid features, no limits, no account.

Does it work without internet? Yes, after the first model download.

Which languages can I speak? Any language Whisper supports, including English and Hindi. Text comes out in English by default; switch "Output language" to keep the spoken language.

Does smart formatting use an AI model? No. Whisper writes the words and the punctuation. Smart formatting is a set of rules in the app that runs on that text: it removes fillers, fixes spacing and turns spoken list markers into a numbered list. Nothing is sent anywhere, and the same words always format the same way. Small local AI models we tested (350M to 3B parameters) dropped or changed words, so the app keeps rules.

Does it work on Windows? Yes, Windows 10 and 11 on x64. The default shortcut is Ctrl + Alt.

How is this different from built-in dictation? It runs a model you choose, entirely on your device, translates to English if you want, keeps a searchable history, and works the same way on Mac and Windows.

Troubleshooting

Something not working? Open Settings > Troubleshooting and click Export Report, or run local-stt diagnostics (it works even when the app will not start). You get one text file, shown in Finder or Explorer, with:

• app version, how it was started, and your settings (the microphone shows only as "system default" or "a chosen device");
• your computer's OS, processor, memory, graphics and free disk;
• which models are downloaded, and how many dictations history holds (never their text);
• on macOS, a short summary of any local-stt crash in the last 30 days (the cause and the crashed thread, without device ids or paths);
• recent error output and the troubleshooting log.

Your home folder shows as ~ and your user name as <user>. Nothing is sent anywhere: read the file, then attach it to an issue or send it to whoever is helping you. Plain text also works well pasted into an AI assistant.

The shortcut does nothing on macOS, though local-stt is switched on. macOS can keep the switch of an older copy. In System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility (Device Control and Data Access on newer macOS), select local-stt, click the minus button and add it again, or use Reinstall below. Settings > General shows Allowed once it works.

Reinstall. Settings > Troubleshooting > Reinstall (or local-stt reinstall) quits local-stt, installs it again (the newest version when one is out) and opens it. On macOS it also resets local-stt's permissions, so macOS asks for them again. Tick the box, or add --clean, to also delete your settings, history, notes, insights and logs; downloaded models stay.

Updating

local-stt checks for a new version once a day (Settings > General > Check automatically). When one is out you see an "Update to ..." item in the menu bar or tray and a banner in the app with Install and Restart, Release Notes, Later and Skip This Version. From a terminal: local-stt check-update.

On macOS, each new version is a new program to the system, so it may ask for Microphone and Accessibility again after an update.

Uninstall

local-stt uninstall          # removes the app, the terminal command and the login item

Your settings, history and models live in ~/Library/Application Support/local-stt (macOS) or %APPDATA%\local-stt (Windows). Delete that folder to remove everything.

Contributing

Bug reports, ideas and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Report a bug

1. Save a diagnostic report: Settings > Troubleshooting > Export Report, or local-stt diagnostics in a terminal. Read it; it never holds audio or dictated text.
2. Open a bug report, describe what happened and attach the report.
3. Security problems go to private reporting, never a public issue.

License

MIT. Whisper models are released by OpenAI under the MIT license; whisper.cpp is MIT licensed by ggml-org.

Wispr Flow, Superwhisper and other product names mentioned here are trademarks of their owners. local-stt is an independent open-source project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by them; the names are used only to say what local-stt can be used instead of.

_{Keywords: free speech to text, offline dictation, local Whisper, private voice typing, voice to text for Mac, voice to text for Windows, push to talk dictation, Hindi to English speech translation, open source Wispr Flow alternative, open source Superwhisper alternative, no cloud transcription.}