🎙️ Local Voice Dictation

Offline speech-to-text by hotkey: hold a key (or mouse button), speak, release — text is recognized locally and pasted into the active window.

🇷🇺 Russian: README.ru.md

---

✨ Features

• 🔒 100% offline — nothing leaves your machine
• 🧠 Two ASR backends — pick one at first launch
  • Whisper large-v3 — multilingual (99 languages)
  • GigaAM v3 e2e_rnnt — Russian-only, ~2× more accurate, better punctuation
• ⚡ CUDA acceleration (CPU also works)
• ⌨️🖱️ Custom hotkey — keyboard, mouse, or any combo
• 📋 Smart clipboard — text and images survive the dictation paste
• 📦 Auto-installs its own dependencies on first run — no pip install needed

---

🚀 Quick start

git clone <repo-url>
cd dictate

Then run:

On first launch you'll be asked to:

1. Press your hotkey combo (e.g. Ctrl + Space) — saved to voice_key.json
2. Pick a model: [1] Whisper or [2] GigaAM

Both choices are remembered. Only the dependencies for the selected backend are installed.

Requires Python 3.10+ pre-installed.

---

🎯 Choosing a model

Pick GigaAM for Russian, Whisper for everything else.

---

▶️ Usage

Hold the hotkey, speak a phrase, release — recognized text is pasted into the active app.

Reconfigure:

• python dictate.py --rebind — change the hotkey
• python dictate.py --remodel — switch the model

---

⚙️ GPU / CPU

Both backends run on NVIDIA GPU (default) or CPU. For GPU you need a recent NVIDIA driver — verify with nvidia-smi. To force CPU, edit DEVICE = "cpu" in dictate.py.

If faster-whisper errors out on CUDA/cuDNN, pin a compatible version: pip install --force-reinstall ctranslate2==4.4.0.

---

🧽 Hallucination filter

Whisper sometimes hallucinates phrases like "Thanks for watching" on silence. hallucinations.txt strips them from the output:

• some phrase — exact match
• ~subscribe — substring
• ^thanks.* — regex
• # comment — comment

---

📝 Notes

• 🛡️ Global keyboard/mouse hooks need admin/root rights on Windows and Linux.
• 🐧 On Linux, Wayland often blocks global hooks — X11 sessions work better.
• 📋 The clipboard is preserved across the paste (text and images both restored, cross-platform).

---

📄 License

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE.