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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 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 pastes 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 full paper-family theme gallery — Paper, Light, Dark, OLED Black, Tan, Brown, Blue, Red, Pink, Green, and Grey — with every text role checked against WCAG AAA 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 pasted text.
Enhanced mode Use F9 when you want punctuation, capitalization, and light cleanup.
Paper UI Large readable type, layered sheets, and accessible theme variants are built into the alpha.

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 phone home, log raw transcripts at the default tracing level, or write your audio to disk. 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.

Alpha Shape

Quill is closed-alpha software. macOS and Linux are the focus today. Windows packaging, meeting transcription, mobile, and always-on captions are outside the current alpha.

The core loop is intentionally simple:

hold hotkey -> capture -> whisper.cpp -> optional embedded polish -> paste

Next Steps