magpie
Dictation that keeps quiet about it.
A small Tauri tray app that turns your voice into clean text without leaving your machine. Whisper for the listening, a tiny LLM for the polish, a global Fn-key for the cue.
Magpie listens. It lives in your menu bar, holds a Fn key, and turns whatever you said into text wherever the cursor happens to be. Whisper handles the transcription, a small local LLM cleans up the false starts and the missing commas, and the result lands in your clipboard before the same sentence would have finished typing.
It exists because dictation is too intimate to rent. The audio never leaves the laptop, the models live next to your apps, and the only thing on the network is your decision not to put one there. A magpie collects shiny things; this one collects sentences.
Dictation is too intimate to rent. We kept the model on the laptop and the magpie in the menu bar.
— Workbench notes
The small
stuff.
The decisions you don't see in screenshots — but feel in the using.
- 01
Hold a key, get a sentence
Hold Fn anywhere on macOS — in a doc, a Slack thread, a terminal — and start talking. Release to transcribe. The result lands in your clipboard or directly under the cursor; the menu-bar icon glows while the model is listening so you always know who is awake.
- 02
Whisper, on your machine
Speech recognition runs locally via whisper-rs. Pick a model size at setup — small for instant turnaround, medium when accuracy matters more than seconds. The audio is decoded, transcribed and discarded; nothing is uploaded, nothing is logged.
- 03
A small LLM, after the fact
A llama.cpp pass turns the verbatim transcript into a real sentence — drops the false starts, inserts the punctuation, restores the brand names Whisper would have mangled. Small enough to ship in the bundle, fast enough to finish before the clipboard hits the screen.
- 04
Tray, overlay, settings — out of the way
A 320×480 popover for history and quick settings, a 160×44 overlay that floats while you talk, and a settings window for permissions and model picks. Open the one you need; the rest stay hidden until you call them.
Built with
Boring tech, used carefully. The sharp edges go in the design, not the stack.