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Local-first voice dictation

Quill

Hold a hotkey, talk, release, and your words appear in the app you already had focused. Speech-to-text, optional polish, and injection all run on your machine by default.

Install Quill First dictation

What Quill Does

Quill is desktop dictation for Apple Silicon macOS and Linux. It captures your voice while you hold a hotkey, transcribes locally with Whisper, optionally cleans the text with embedded llama.cpp, and inserts the result into the focused field.

The app is paper-first by default: large Literata reading type, layered sheet surfaces without glow, and a live transcript canvas that stays focused on what you are saying while you record. Settings includes the current Corvid Light/Dark theme system with accessible contrast.

Local by default No transcript or audio leaves the machine unless you explicitly choose a remote provider.
Fast raw mode Use F8 for the shortest path from speech to inserted text.
Enhanced mode Use an enhanced binding when you want translation, punctuation, capitalization, and light cleanup.
Paper UI Large readable type, layered sheets, and accessible Corvid Light/Dark themes are built into the beta.

Privacy First

Most dictation tools stream your microphone to a server. Quill does not. The default install runs:

  • Speech-to-text locally with whisper.cpp, with Metal acceleration on Apple Silicon.
  • Polish locally through embedded llama.cpp and a verified GGUF model in Quill's model cache.
  • Text injection through OS accessibility and clipboard paths, with macOS Accessibility writes when the focused field allows it.

The daemon will not log raw transcripts at the default tracing level or write your audio to disk. Beta diagnostics are anonymous and transcript-free. Cloud STT and remote polish endpoints exist for teams that want them, but they are opt-in and surfaced as a privacy trade-off. See the privacy promise for the full contract.

Who It Is For

  • Programmers who type for a living and want their wrists back.
  • Writers who think faster than they type, especially for first drafts.
  • People who cannot reliably use a keyboard.
  • Anyone who wants dictation without handing audio to a third party.

Beta Shape

Quill is beta/dogfood software. Apple Silicon macOS 14+ and Linux x86_64 are published today. Windows is a source-build preview, not a first-class packaged target yet. Linux aarch64 is locally packageable but not published as a tagged release asset yet.

The core loop is intentionally simple:

hold hotkey -> capture -> whisper.cpp -> optional translate/polish -> insert

Next Steps