whispers

Private intended-text dictation for Wayland.
Press once, speak naturally, press again.

Whispers is one local dictation pipeline, not a collection of modes. It records from PipeWire, shows a low-latency Nemotron preview, then transcribes the full recording with multilingual Parakeet TDT v3 before applying your vocabulary, spoken symbols, and a conservative local Qwen cleanup. The result is typed into the window where dictation began.

A compact bottom-center OSD shows whether Whispers is listening, transcribing, enhancing, or delivering. It runs out of process through Quickshell, keeping GUI toolkits out of the Rust build.

Saying “this slash that” produces this/that. Saying “the word slash” keeps the word. literal slash is the explicit escape hatch.

Clear spoken number lists use digits. Saying “one, two, three, put a hyphen between those” produces 1-2-3; comma, slash, and space work as explicit separators too.

Why the rewrite is smaller

The Rust application is a control plane with seven direct dependencies. It does not compile or vendor whisper.cpp, llama.cpp, CUDA, an async runtime, an audio stack, or a GUI toolkit. whispers setup downloads checksum-pinned sherpa-onnx, Nemotron, Parakeet, llama.cpp, and Qwen artifacts. Inference runtimes can therefore be upgraded independently without turning every application build into an ML toolchain build.

There is one binary and one interaction:

whispers setup
whispers        # start listening
whispers        # finish, infer intended text, and deliver

No audio or transcript is retained. Setup is the only operation that needs the network; dictation and enhancement run locally.

Install

Linux x86_64, Wayland, PipeWire, wtype, wl-copy, curl, tar, bzip2, and sha256sum are required. On Arch Linux:

paru -S whispers-git
whispers setup

Or build from source:

cargo install --path . --locked
whispers setup

Setup downloads roughly 4 GB and preserves any version 1 configuration as a timestamped backup before importing useful settings and vocabulary.

Bind whispers to one compositor shortcut. For Hyprland:

bind = SUPER ALT, D, exec, whispers

For Niri:

Mod+Alt+D { spawn "whispers"; }

Commands

whispers                         Toggle dictation
whispers cancel                  Cancel recording or finalization
whispers status                  Print the service state
whispers setup                   Install runtimes and migrate configuration
whispers doctor                  Diagnose the local runtime
whispers vocabulary list
whispers vocabulary add TERM --alias SPOKEN
whispers vocabulary remove TERM

See installation, the CLI guide, and architecture, plus troubleshooting, for details. The generated configuration lives at ~/.config/whispers/config.toml; the canonical shape is in config.example.toml.

License

Whispers is licensed under the MIT License. Downloaded inference runtimes and models retain their respective upstream licenses and are not redistributed in this repository.