Note: call the venue about Saturday
Saved to Notes, nothing pasted
Quick notes
Hold the ~ key and tap Q. The pill turns blue and the thought goes to your Notes instead of the page.
Free speech-to-text for Windows
Talk. It types.
Hold Ctrl + Win, talk, and let go. Your words show up wherever you're typing. It all runs on your PC, so your voice never leaves it.
v0.11.0 · 13 MB · Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit
- Free and open source
- No account
- Works offline
On a Mac or Linux? Ask for it
How it works
Hold, talk, let go
Your words land where you're typing, a phrase at a time, while you're still talking.
Launch plan
Thursday · team update
01Click into any text box
Email, Slack, Word, your code editor. Anywhere you'd type.
02Hold Ctrl + Win and talk
A small pill shows what it hears while you speak.
03Let go
Your words land where you were typing. Nothing to copy or paste.
Private by design
Your voice stays on your PC
Your PC
Your voiceRecorded here
Speech modelTurns it into text, offline
Your cursorThe words land here
Your history and recordings are kept here too, for as long as you choose.
What goes online, and when
Update checks
At start, when you come back to it, and every 6 hours. Can be turned off.
Model download
Once, when you pick a model, and checked against its known SHA-256 hash.
GitHub backup
Off until you connect it.
Online AI
Only if you point the AI tools at one.
Never your audio. No account, no tracking.Check the code: n8watkins/scribe
Optional · local AI
An AI on your PC that tidies your words
Scribe hands the text to LM Studio or Ollama, free apps that run AI models on your own computer. Install one and turn the AI tools on in Scribe.
- Rewrite works in any app
- Runs on your PC
- LM Studio or Ollama
- Off until you turn it on
Rewrite anything you highlight
Select text in any app, press Ctrl + Alt + R and say what to change. Scribe swaps in the rewrite and puts your clipboard back.
Selected
hey so i think we should push the launch, screenshots arent done and the copy needs another pass
You say
Make this clear and professional.
You get
Let's move the launch date. The screenshots aren't finished, and the copy needs one more review.
Turn a ramble into a to-do list
Dictate a quick note, then one click gives you a summary and its action items. You can change what it asks for.
Your note
ok so tomorrow I need to send Maya the new timeline, go over the homepage copy, and um book the dentist before Friday
You get
Plans for tomorrow.
- Send Maya the new timeline
- Review the homepage copy
- Book the dentist before Friday
Models
Pick the model that fits your PC
Each download is hash-checked, and Scribe uses your graphics card when it can.
OpenAI Whisper models, run on your PC by
whisper.cpp
whisper.cppThe models run from faster to more accurate in the order listed.
- Tiny75 MiB
- Base142 MiB
- Small, compressedStarts here181 MiBStarts here
- Small466 MiB
- Large v3 Turbo, compressed547 MiB
- Medium1.5 GiB
- Large v3 Turbo1.6 GiB
Most come in English-only and multilingual builds. 29 languages, or let it detect yours; any of them can come out as English text.
Make it yours
Your colours, your Scribe
Six themes built in, including a light one. Watch a tour of the app, or pick a theme to try.
Scribe
Private local dictation
DashboardTranscribeHistoryNotesSyncStatsSettingsData & PrivacyHotkeysModelsAudioThemesAbout
StatusReady for dictation
Active micMicrophone (USB Audio)
Active modelsmall.en-q5_1
Auto-insertOn
Last Transcript Buffer
Ready to insert later
Thursday works for me. I'll send the invite this afternoon.
Hotkeys
Hold-to-TalkCtrl + Win
Toggle Dictation~ (tilde)
Paste LastCtrl + Alt + V
Open DashboardCtrl + Alt + F
Discard / CancelCtrl + Alt + X
Transform SelectionCtrl + Alt + R
Transform selection
Ctrl + Alt + RHighlight text in any app, describe the change, and Scribe rewrites it in place with your local LLM.
e.g. make this concise, translate to Spanish, fix grammar
Or make your own: pick five colours in Scribe and it builds the rest of the theme.
And the rest
More than dictation
All of it in the free app, all of it on your PC.
“my email”n8@example.com
“my sign-off”Thanks, Nate
Your words, your way
Say a short phrase and get the long one. Add names and jargon to a word list so they come out right.
Words today
1,284
Average WPM
142
Latency avg
0.6 s
History and stats
Search and play back everything you said, and see how much you talk instead of type.
Also in the box
- Hands-free on the ~ key, stopping after a minute of silence
- Ctrl + Alt + V pastes the last one
- Leaves out “um” and “uh” if you like
- Audio and video files into text
- Combine entries, or open one in your editor
- Keep history 30 days, forever, or not at all
- Back up to a private GitHub repo, or export Markdown, CSV or JSON
- Lives in the tray, starts with Windows
FAQ
Questions
Yes. Scribe is free and open source (MIT), with no account, no subscription and no limits. If it helps you, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi.
No. Your voice is recorded and turned into text on your PC, and the audio never leaves it. Each recording is kept on your PC so you can play it back in History, and is deleted with its transcript (after 30 days by default). Turn off “Save raw audio clips” to delete recordings as soon as the text is ready.
The installer isn't code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen may call it an unrecognized app. Choose “More info”, then “Run anyway”. Only download Scribe from here or its GitHub page, where you can see the code and check every release.
A 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 PC and a microphone. The default speech model is 190 MB. A graphics card makes the bigger models fast, but you don't need one.
Yes. Once a speech model is downloaded, dictation works with no internet at all.
Scribe is Windows-only for now. Open a request on GitHub and say which system you use. The requests decide what comes next.
Open a request ↗Nothing until you connect it. Then Scribe saves your notes as Markdown files in a private GitHub repo that you own, and your transcripts too if you choose. It checks the repo is private, and it never uploads audio.
Give it a try. It's free.
I use it every day. I hope you like it too.
13 MB. Windows may warn you because the installer isn't code-signed yet; you can check it against the published checksums.