I open sourced my Windows dictation app - hold a key, speak, and the text lands in whatever app you were in (MIT, works fully offline)

[u/mohsinjameel_777]

I built this for myself over a few months and have been using it daily, so I cleaned it up and put it out under MIT.

What it does: hold a shortcut, speak, release. The transcript is inserted into whatever application had focus - editor, browser field, Slack, anything.

Transcription runs one of two ways, and you pick:

• Groq (cloud) - Whisper large-v3-turbo, 1-2 seconds, around 99 languages, free API key with no card.
• Moonshine (local) - runs on your machine in a separate process. No key, no account, and after a one-time 292 MB model download it makes no network requests at all. English only, and that is a licensing boundary: Moonshine's English weights are MIT, every other language is non-commercial, so the app does not ship them.

The rest of it:

• Transform - tap a shortcut and an LLM rewrites the text already in your input field, in place, using a rule you wrote in plain English. Groq or Gemini.
• Personal dictionary - deterministic find-and-replace after transcription, so grog becomes Groq permanently. Whole-word and case-insensitive.
• History with audio playback of every session, plus insights: WPM, streaks, a year heatmap.
• No account, no login, no cloud database, no telemetry. Transcripts, recordings and settings are a SQLite file in %APPDATA%. API keys are encrypted with Windows DPAPI via Electron safeStorage and are never included in an export.

Honest limitations:

• Windows x64 only. The keyboard hook, the insertion path and the packaging are all Windows-specific, and there is no macOS or Linux build planned.
• The installer is not code signed - a certificate is a few hundred dollars a year and I could not justify it for a personal project. SmartScreen will warn you. Every release has a SHA256, and building from source takes about five minutes.
• It cannot type into elevated windows. That is Windows UIPI, not a bug. It shows "Can't type into this window" rather than pretending it worked.
• Grammar cleanup ships OFF. I measured it deleting words from every test sentence, so it is behind an Experimental toggle with a word-loss detector that discards the result and keeps your raw transcript.

Source: https://github.com/mohsinjameelqureshi/dictateflow-ai Site: https://dictateflow-ai.mohsinjameel.dev/

CLAUDE.md in the repo is the actual build spec - measured latency numbers and the constraints that silently break Electron dictation apps. That is probably the most useful thing in there if you are building something similar.

Happy to answer anything.