Introduction
What VoxFlow is, what it does to your voice on the way to your cursor, and what state the project is in today.
VoxFlow is a voice dictation app for macOS. You hold a hotkey, speak, and let go. A moment later the text is sitting at your cursor in whatever app had focus — cleaned up, punctuated, and free of the “um”s.
It is built for people who want that without a subscription and without shipping their voice to someone else’s server. Transcription runs on your own machine. Provider keys are yours. The whole thing is MIT licensed.
What happens when you dictate
- Hotkey. Hold ⌥ ⌃. A small pill fades in at the bottom of the screen. Nothing takes focus.
- Capture. Audio comes in through CoreAudio and passes a voice activity detector, which trims the silence at either end.
- Transcribe. Whisper runs locally through
whisper.cppwith Metal acceleration. - Rewrite. The raw transcript goes through an AI cleanup pass that turns speech into a sentence. This is the one step that can leave your machine, and you choose where it goes.
- Insert. The finished text is pasted at the cursor, and stored in a local history database so you can recover it later.
What it is built on
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Core pipeline | Rust workspace — audio, VAD, Whisper, provider, insertion, history |
| Audio capture | CPAL (CoreAudio) |
| Silence trimming | WebRTC VAD |
| Transcription | whisper-rs / whisper.cpp with Metal |
| Rewrite pass | Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — Groq, OpenAI, or self-hosted |
| App shell | Tauri 2 + React — settings window, overlay pill, tray |
| History | SQLite |
| Secrets | macOS Keychain via the keyring crate |
Everything on the latency-critical path — the hotkey tap, capture, VAD, the state machine — is Rust. The web layer only draws.
Project status
VoxFlow is in early development. The supported way to install it is the macOS disk image. Expect a few rough edges.
- macOS is the supported platform today. macOS 13 or later, Apple Silicon recommended so Whisper can use Metal.
- Linux support is in progress. The Wayland and X11 differences around global hotkeys and synthetic input are real and not yet resolved.
- Windows is not a target.
Start with Install on macOS.