minidic 1.0.4

Tiny macOS dictation tool on your menubar

minidic

A tiny macOS dictation tool for fast voice input from the menu bar or terminal.

Install

minidic is published on PyPI for macOS users.

uv tool install minidic

To upgrade an existing install:

uv tool upgrade minidic

The first run will download mlx-community/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3.

uv tool installs minidic to ~/.local/bin/minidic. Make sure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH.

Usage

On first use, macOS will prompt for the permissions required by minidic. In general, you need to grant these permissions to the terminal app you use to run the commands:

• Microphone — needed to capture live audio for dictation
• Accessibility — needed to inject the transcribed text into the active app and handle global hotkeys in menu bar mode

To use --gemini, set GEMINI_API_KEY in your environment before running minidic.

Console

Run an interactive dictation session in the terminal. This records from your microphone, transcribes locally, and inserts the final text into the active app.

minidic console
minidic console --gemini

Transcribe

Transcribe an existing audio file from disk instead of recording live microphone input.

minidic transcribe path/to/file.wav
minidic transcribe --gemini path/to/file.wav

Menubar

Run minidic as a menu bar app with a background daemon and global F5 hotkey for push-to-toggle dictation.

minidic menubar

1. Start the menu bar app.
2. Optionally choose a max recording length from Duration in the menu.
3. Click Start daemon (or Stop daemon to stop it).
4. Press F5 to toggle start/stop dictation (captured globally; other apps will not receive F5 while daemon is running).

Technique overview

minidic captures microphone audio, normalizes it to 16 kHz, and runs local speech-to-text with streaming-style decoding.

Models used

• ASR model: parakeet-mlx for on-device audio transcription on Apple Silicon / MLX
• LLM model: gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview for optional transcript cleanup (thinking disabled)

High-level pipeline

1. Capture mic audio with sounddevice
2. Resample to 16 kHz with soxr (when needed)
3. Transcribe with parakeet-mlx on-device
4. Smooth transcription by default with local regex cleanup (remove filler words like um, uh, etc.)
5. Further smooth with Gemini when GEMINI_API_KEY is set and Gemini mode is enabled (via --gemini for console/transcribe, or via the menu bar toggle)
6. Inject text into the active app on macOS

The daemon mode is hotkey-driven and lazily loads/unloads the model to reduce idle resource usage.

Directory structure

~/.minidic/
├── settings.json          # persisted runtime config such as Gemini and duration settings
└── recordings/            # saved WAV recordings captured during dictation/transcription

~/.local/state/minidic/
├── daemon.log             # daemon logs
├── daemon.pid             # daemon process ID
├── daemon.state           # current daemon state: idle, recording, transcribing
├── menubar.log            # menu bar app logs
└── menubar.pid            # menu bar process ID