parlando 0.5.0

Local voice dictation for macOS (Apple Silicon). Tap a key, speak, tap again — your words are typed into whatever window has focus. 100% on-device: audio never leaves your machine.

Features

• Fully local & offline — MLX-accelerated Qwen3-ASR on the Apple Neural stack; works on a plane, nothing is uploaded, no API keys.
• Tap-to-dictate — single tap of right ⌥ Option starts/stops recording (the same pattern superwhisper and Wispr Flow use). No always-on mic.
• Types anywhere — text is delivered as native keyboard events (Quartz CGEvent unicode), so it works in any app, editor, terminal, or chat box.
• 30 languages — Turkish by default; switch instantly (e.g. --language English) with no model reload.
• Voice commands — "nokta", "virgül", "soru işareti", "yeni satır", "gönder" (presses Enter); the English set ("period", "comma", "question mark", "new line", "send") is active with --language English.
• Cleanup & polish — vocalized fillers ("um", "uh", "eee") are removed automatically; optional --polish runs a small local LLM that drops contextual fillers ("you know", "yani"), stutters and false starts, and fixes punctuation — guarded so it can only edit your words, never answer them.
• Menu bar app — (idle · recording · paused) with start/stop, language switcher, start-at-login, and a live status block: model download progress, ready / recording / transcribing, and permission problems with a one-click fix.
• A real app — parlando --install-app creates Parlando.app so macOS asks for permissions in Parlando's name (not your terminal's) and keeps them across upgrades.
• Self-healing — audio watchdog survives sleep/wake and device changes; inference errors never kill the session.
• Streaming mode (optional) — words appear as you speak, stabilized with LocalAgreement-2 and append-only commits (typed text is never retracted).

Requirements

• macOS on Apple Silicon
• uv installed
• ~2 GB disk for the default ASR model (downloaded once from Hugging Face)

Installation

parlando is on PyPI. With uv (recommended):

uv tool install parlando     # puts the parlando command on your PATH
parlando --install-app       # creates ~/Applications/Parlando.app (see Permissions)

or try it without installing anything permanent:

uvx parlando

or with pipx / pip:

pipx install parlando        # isolated install, commands on PATH
pip install parlando         # into your current Python environment

# one-liner that also installs uv if you don't have it
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/furkanc/parlando/main/install.sh | sh

# from source
git clone https://github.com/furkanc/parlando && cd parlando
uv run parlando              # run without installing
uv tool install .            # install commands from the checkout

# uninstall
uv tool uninstall parlando   # (or: pipx uninstall parlando / pip uninstall parlando)

Quick start

parlando                 # menu bar app: icon top right, settings in its menu
parlando --terminal      # ...or dictate from this terminal window

After parlando --install-app, open Parlando from Spotlight or ~/Applications like any other app; permissions are then asked in Parlando's name instead of your terminal's, and stay granted across uv tool upgrade parlando.

1. On first run the speech model (~2 GB) downloads once; after that everything works offline.
2. macOS will ask for Microphone and Accessibility permissions (see below) — grant them; parlando picks them up by itself.
3. Click the window you want to type into → tap right ⌥ Option → speak → tap again. Your words appear at the cursor.

Permissions (one-time)

macOS asks for two permissions and grants them to the responsible app: Parlando when you use Parlando.app, otherwise the terminal you run parlando from (Terminal, iTerm, VS Code, ...). This is why the app bundle is recommended: the permission is asked once, in Parlando's name, and keeps working whichever terminal you use.

parlando triggers the system prompts itself, detects missing permissions and says so explicitly (in the terminal, or in a dialog from the menu bar app) instead of failing silently. Without Accessibility the hotkey is not heard at all. Once you grant it, parlando notices within a few seconds and enables the hotkey by itself. macOS sometimes quits the app the moment the switch is flipped; Parlando.app reopens itself in that case. This is a one-time step: the launcher bundle does not change on upgrades, so macOS keeps the permission.

Parlando.app is a thin launcher (Info.plist, icon, a Mach-O stub and a script that runs the installed package) generated on your Mac and ad-hoc signed, so nothing is downloaded and no developer certificate is needed. Its contents do not change on upgrades, so macOS keeps the permissions. Re-run --install-app only after moving the Python environment that owns the package (that resets the permissions once).

Usage

parlando                      # menu bar app (default)
parlando --install-app        # create ~/Applications/Parlando.app (recommended)
parlando --uninstall-app      # remove it (and the login item)
parlando --install-login      # start the menu bar app at login
parlando --terminal           # dictate from the terminal; the options below need it
parlando -t --language English   # dictate in another language
parlando -t --polish             # LLM cleanup (fillers, false starts, punctuation)
parlando -t --enter              # press Enter after each utterance
parlando -t --mode stream        # live word-by-word streaming
parlando --pipe                  # print to stdout (scriptable; implies --terminal)
parlando -t --hotkey cmd_r       # tap right Command instead
parlando --list-devices          # list microphones

Voice commands

Disable with --no-commands.

Models

Speech recognition (--model, MLX Qwen3-ASR — 30 languages):

Polish LLM (--polish-model, used only with --polish; scores from scripts/eval_polish.py, an 11-case cleanup benchmark):

parlando -t --polish --polish-model mlx-community/Qwen3-4B-4bit

All models download once from Hugging Face and are cached in ~/.cache/huggingface; everything runs on-device.

The two modes

record (default) — tap, speak freely (pauses are fine), tap again; the whole recording is transcribed once and typed in one go. Recordings longer than 28 s are split at natural silence points (2 min cap). This mode has no VAD guessing, so it is the most robust.

stream — always listening; an energy VAD (hysteresis, adaptive noise floor, optional --silero hybrid) segments utterances and words appear as you speak. More "live", more sensitive to room noise.

Troubleshooting

Note: --device indices shift when devices connect/disconnect, and virtual devices ("Microsoft Teams Audio", "ZoomAudioDevice") are not microphones. Prefer the default device.

Architecture

microphone ── 30 ms frames ──▶ hotkey-gated recorder (record mode)
                              or energy VAD w/ hysteresis + adaptive floor,
                              optional Silero hybrid, 300 ms pre-roll (stream)
                │ segment boundaries
                ▼
        segment audio only ──▶ Qwen3-ASR (MLX, on-device GPU)
                │ readings
                ▼
        LocalAgreement-2 ──▶ append-only word commits ──▶ CGEvent unicode
        (commit on 2-reading    (typed text is never        keyboard events
         agreement)              retracted)

Key decisions (each one earned by a real failure during development):

• Segment-based ASR, not a rolling window — re-decoding a growing window revises earlier words (visible flicker) and hallucinates on silence.
• Append-only, word-count-based commits — exact-prefix matching stalls permanently when the ASR reshapes punctuation on committed words.
• Normalized agreement + stall safety valve — punctuation/case flapping between readings must not freeze the stream.
• Asymmetric noise-floor learning — a symmetric EMA lets speech scraps poison the floor and the app goes progressively deaf.
• Every loop iteration guarded — a single ASR exception must not silently kill the pipeline.
• Chord-aware hotkey — ⌥+Q-style character chords never toggle dictation.

Development

uvx --with numpy pytest tests -q   # unit tests; no model/mic needed
uv run scripts/eval_polish.py      # polish quality benchmark (real local LLM)
uv run scripts/make_icons.py       # regenerate icons, banner, Parlando.icns
scripts/build_launcher.sh          # rebuild the Parlando.app Mach-O stub
scripts/build_app.sh               # experimental: self-contained Parlando.app + .dmg
scripts/make_signing_cert.sh       # experimental: stable signing identity for that build
uv build                           # build the wheel/sdist

Package layout: src/parlando/ (engine, menubar, ASR engine, assets incl. the prebuilt app launcher). Entry point parlando (menu bar app by default, --terminal for the CLI); parlando-menubar is kept as an alias. CI runs the test suite and a packaging build on macOS via GitHub Actions.

scripts/build_app.sh produces a self-contained Parlando.app + .dmg (embedded Python and dependencies, ~250 MB; the speech model still downloads on first run). It is not the supported distribution yet: a downloaded app needs Developer ID signing and notarization to open without a Gatekeeper detour, and a stable signing identity so permissions survive updates (make_signing_cert.sh provides a self-signed one for local experiments). Until then, install with uv.

Roadmap

• One-line installer (install.sh) with parlando launcher command
• Proper Python package (uv tool install, entry points)
• Publish to PyPI (uvx parlando works)
• Homebrew tap (brew install parlando)
• End-to-end regression tests with recorded WAV fixtures
• Custom vocabulary / context biasing

License & credits

MIT. The Qwen3-ASR MLX engine (stt.py) is from dictate.sh by Marc Puig (MIT), with local modifications (partial streaming, energy gating, error hardening). Turn-taking research: Whisper-Streaming / LocalAgreement-2. VAD: Silero VAD.