Local speech-to-text for Windows, powered by Whisper. Press a global hotkey, speak, and your words land on the clipboard (and optionally type themselves at the cursor). Transcription runs entirely on your device by default. No account, no internet, no telemetry. Free and open source.
On a Mac? There is a native Apple Silicon build too: talkty-mac (Metal accelerated, menu-bar app). Same idea, built the right way for each platform.
Most dictation tools send your microphone to someone else's server. That is a hard no for a lot of what people actually say out loud: client work, half-formed ideas, anything private. Talkty does the opposite. Whisper runs locally on your machine, the audio is thrown away the moment it becomes text, and nothing leaves the device unless you deliberately turn on a cloud feature.
It started as a tool for people who code by talking to an AI agent. Dictate a rambling thought, get clean text, paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, or a terminal. The optional Prompting mode goes one step further and rewrites that dictation into a structured prompt. But none of that is required. At its core it is a fast, private "hold a key, speak, get text" tool that works in any app.
- Runs on your device. Local Whisper transcription with optional GPU acceleration. Audio never leaves your machine and is discarded after transcription.
- Press, speak, paste. A global hotkey (default
Alt+Q) starts and stops recording from any app. Text goes straight to the clipboard. - Type at the cursor. Turn on auto-paste and the text inserts itself where you were typing. Works in editors, terminals, browsers, and chat apps.
- GPU when you have one. Auto-detects CUDA (NVIDIA), then Vulkan (AMD and Intel iGPUs), then falls back to CPU. A long clip transcribes in well under a second on a GPU.
- Coding vocabulary built in. A two-layer system biases Whisper toward developer
terms and fixes the ones it still gets wrong (for example "cube cuddle" becomes
kubectl, "post gres" becomesPostgreSQL). Fully editable in Settings. - Clean output. Re-joins sentences split by a pause, strips Whisper
hallucinations like
[MUSIC]and "Thanks for watching", and normalizes punctuation. - Quiet in the tray. Lives in the system tray, shows a small floating pill while recording, and ducks background audio so the mic hears you clearly.
- Light on your PC. Zero CPU while idle, and the speech model's memory (up to several GB for the large models) is freed after 15 minutes of inactivity — it reloads automatically while you speak, so you never notice.
- Cloud transcription (opt-in). Route a take through OpenRouter models (GPT-4o Transcribe, Whisper Large V3, Qwen3 ASR, and more) when you want extra accuracy. Local stays the default.
- Prompting mode (opt-in). Hover the recording pill, tap the sparkle, and your dictation is expanded into a structured prompt for a coding AI agent before it hits the clipboard.
- Download the latest
TalktySetup-*.exefrom the Releases page. - Run it. The installer is per-user and needs no admin rights. Windows SmartScreen may warn that the publisher is unknown (the app is not yet code signed). Choose More info -> Run anyway.
- Launch Talkty. Open Settings, pick a model, and let it download.
- Press
Alt+Q, speak, press it again to stop. Your text is on the clipboard.
Upgrading is the same: run the new installer over the old one. Your settings stay put.
Models download on demand from HuggingFace into %AppData%\Talkty\Models\.
| Tier | Model | Size | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fast | Tiny | 75 MB | Quick notes, simple phrases |
| Balanced | Small | 466 MB | Everyday English dictation |
| Balanced | Large v3 Turbo | 1.6 GB | 99+ languages, the all-round pick (recommended) |
| Accurate | Large v3 | 3.1 GB | Maximum accuracy |
Quantized "Lite" variants are available for CPU-only machines (smaller and lighter with a small accuracy trade). Pick any of them in Settings -> Local models.
Two features trade a little privacy for accuracy or convenience. Both are off by default and both run through a single OpenRouter API key that is stored encrypted on your device (Windows DPAPI), never in plain text.
- Cloud transcription sends one recording to a hosted model when you select a cloud model in Settings. Useful for long or difficult audio. Local Whisper stays the offline default the rest of the time.
- Prompting takes the words you just dictated and rewrites them into a clean, structured prompt for a coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex). It keeps every detail you said and drops the filler. If anything fails, it falls back to your raw transcription. See docs/PROMPTING.md for the design and the model choices.
Leave both off and Talkty stays 100% local.
Local transcription is fully private:
- Audio never leaves your device.
- No internet connection is required for local models.
- Audio is discarded immediately after it is turned into text.
- No telemetry, no analytics, no account.
If you turn on Cloud transcription or Prompting, the relevant audio or text is sent to OpenRouter for that one request. Your API key is encrypted on disk. Turn the features off to stay offline.
Open Settings from the gear icon or by right-clicking the tray icon.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Model | Which Whisper model to use, local or cloud |
| Microphone | Audio input device, with a built-in test |
| Hotkey | Global shortcut (default Alt+Q) |
| Language | Force a language or auto-detect |
| GPU | Use CUDA or Vulkan acceleration when available |
| Auto-paste | Insert the text at the cursor after transcription |
| Volume ducking | Lower other audio while recording |
| Vocabulary | Custom coding terms and text replacements |
| API key | OpenRouter key for Cloud and Prompting (encrypted) |
Requirements: .NET 8 SDK, Windows 10 or 11, and (for the installer) Inno Setup 6.
# Build and run
cd Talkty.App
dotnet build
dotnet run
# Release build (not single-file: Whisper needs the runtimes folder)
dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true
# Installer
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Inno Setup 6\ISCC.exe" installer\TalktySetup.issRun the tests with dotnet test. The version number lives in a single place,
version.txt, and flows into the assembly and the installer automatically.
Talkty.App/
Models/ App settings, model profiles, vocabulary defaults
Services/ Audio capture, transcription, hotkey, auto-paste, clipboard
Engines/ Whisper (CUDA/Vulkan/CPU), SherpaOnnx, OpenRouter cloud
ViewModels/ Recording state machine and settings logic (MVVM)
Views/ Main window, settings, overlay pill, onboarding
Talkty.Tests/ xUnit tests for the text post-processing pipeline
installer/ Inno Setup script
docs/ PROMPTING.md and assets
A deeper tour of the architecture lives in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.
.NET 8 and WPF, MVVM via CommunityToolkit.Mvvm, Whisper.net for transcription, NAudio for capture, and Hardcodet.NotifyIcon.Wpf for the tray.
Issues and pull requests are welcome. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md for how to build, what gets tested, and the conventions to match. Security policy and how to report a vulnerability: SECURITY.md.