Desert Ant CLI

Transcribe a recording, cut it into clips, clean up the audio, redact personal data from a text, suggest emoji, or tag a topic, with Desert Ant Labs models running on your own machine. Weights download once. Nothing leaves the device.

The command is desertant; da is the short alias.

$ da voz talk.mp4 -t
0:00  We build small models that run on the device.
0:04  Nothing leaves the phone, and there is no cloud bill.
Transcribed 48 minutes of audio in 9.7s, 296x realtime.

$ da clips talk.mp4
 1  10:14 to 10:42  27s
    The one thing the meter can't sell you is inference that costs nothing.
    talk_clip-1.mp4
8 clips from 48 minutes in 41s.

$ da redact "Email Anna at anna@example.hu or call 555-0100"
Email [GIVEN_NAME_1] at [EMAIL_1] or call [PHONE_1]

Type da for the list of commands. Coding agents get the same tool: every command returns JSON with --json, reads stdin, and exits 0, 1, or 64, and da schema --json describes each command and how they chain.

Models

Every model has a page on desertant.com with its numbers, its limits, and a live demo. da info <model> prints the same card.

• Voz da voz talk.mp4
  On-device speech recognition: transcripts with word-level timestamps, 25 languages.
• Clips da clips talk.mp4
  Short clips and highlights from talking video and audio: podcasts, interviews, meetings. On-device.
• Clear da clear talk.mp4
  On-device speech enhancement: denoise, dereverb, and loudness-normalize.
• Uhm da uhm talk.mp4
  On-device filler-word detection: frame-precise "uh"/"um"/"hmm" spans.
• Ear da ear talk.mp4
  On-device spoken language identification across 99 languages.
• Redact da redact "<text>"
  Multilingual on-device PII detection and redaction.
• Emo da emo "<text>"
  Multilingual on-device emoji suggestion.
• Gist da gist "<text>"
  Multilingual on-device content topic tagging across a 36-topic taxonomy.
• Title da title "<text>"
  On-device titles and descriptions: a short factual title and a one- to two-sentence description for any passage of text.

Voz, Uhm, and Title need Apple silicon. The rest run on macOS and Linux. da models lists what runs on your machine; da models --all lists the full catalog.

Transcripts and captions

da voz talk.mp4 prints the transcript, one sentence per line; -t puts the time in front of each. The files are one flag each, written beside the input:

da voz talk.mp4 --srt          talk.srt, captions
da voz talk.mp4 --vtt --txt    talk.vtt and talk.txt
da voz talk.mp4 -o notes.vtt   one file, the format from its extension
da voz talk.mp4 --format srt   SRT on stdout, for a pipe

Captions are cut the way broadcasters cut them: two lines of 42 characters at most, at most 7s on screen, breaking at the end of a sentence first. da docs voz has the rest.

Install

The script

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Desert-Ant-Labs/desert-ant-cli/main/install.sh | sh

Downloads the release for your machine, checks it against the release's checksums, puts it in ~/.local/share/desertant, and symlinks desertant and da into ~/.local/bin. DESERTANT_BIN and DESERTANT_HOME change those two directories. desertant update runs the script again later.

Homebrew

brew install desert-ant-labs/tap/desertant

brew upgrade desertant moves to the next release.

mise

mise use -g "ubi:Desert-Ant-Labs/desert-ant-cli[exe=desertant]"

All three install the same release: macOS on Apple silicon, and Linux on x86_64 and arm64.

Chain

Commands compose through their JSON. Transcribe once, then cut:

da voz talk.mp4 --json | da clips talk.mp4 --transcript -

da schema --json names which command's output feeds which. da docs pipelines covers the rest.

A command that writes a file never replaces one: a taken name steps aside (talk_clear-2.mp4), the output can never be the input, and --force is the only way to overwrite.

Coding agents

One command sets up every agent it finds on your machine, in the current project:

desertant setup

Claude Code gets .claude/skills/desertant/SKILL.md, Pi gets .pi/skills/desertant/SKILL.md, and Codex gets a marked section in AGENTS.md. desertant setup claude does one agent; --global writes where the agent looks for every project. Or paste this into the agent and let it do both steps:

Install the Desert Ant CLI with: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Desert-Ant-Labs/desert-ant-cli/main/install.sh | sh
Then run `desertant setup` in this project.

Works in the Claude Code terminal, VS Code extension, and desktop app, and in the Codex CLI and app. Any other agent with a shell needs nothing more than --json, stdin, the exit codes, and da schema --json. The Claude chat app has no shell, so desertant doesn't reach it yet; an MCP server over the same catalog is the planned route.

Docs

da docs prints docs offline. The docs also live in the repo, indexed by llms.txt: using desertant from an agent, the JSON contracts, files and the cache, clips, pipelines, and performance.

Adapters for Claude Code, Codex, and Pi live in integrations/.

License

MIT for the CLI. The models desertant runs are under the Desert Ant Labs source-available license.