Local-first voice dictation for Linux.
Double-tap a hotkey, speak, tap again — your words appear wherever your cursor is.

Incant is a voice dictation daemon for Arch Linux + Hyprland + Wayland + PipeWire. It runs entirely on your machine — no cloud services, no accounts, no telemetry. Speech is transcribed locally with NVIDIA's Parakeet‑TDT model via sherpa‑onnx; typical end‑to‑end latency after the first inference is a few hundred milliseconds on a modern CPU.

• Double‑tap dictation — tap the hotkey twice quickly to start recording; tap once more to stop and transcribe.
• Safe with Alt combos — by default Incant only reacts to an explicit double‑tap, so bindings like Alt alone, Alt+Tab, or Alt+F4 never trigger a recording.
• Live recording overlay — a GTK4 layer‑shell capsule with an animated audio meter shows recording state.
• Procedural sound effects — start / stop / paste / cancel cues generated at runtime (no sample files on disk).
• Two on‑device models — Parakeet‑TDT 0.6B v2 (default, ~622 MB) for accuracy, or Moonshine Tiny (~120 MB, English) for size.
• Pinned, verified model downloads — every file is fetched from a pinned HuggingFace commit and SHA‑256 verified.
• Resilient text injection — wtype (Wayland virtual keyboard), with dotool and wl-copy fallbacks.
• Fully local — model weights live in ~/.cache/incant/models/; no audio or text ever leaves your machine.

Other Linux distributions are likely to work for the daemon itself but are not regularly tested; the installer is Arch/pacman‑specific. PRs welcome.

git clone https://github.com/zaakirio/Incant.git
cd Incant
./install.sh

The installer detects your system, installs system dependencies, builds in release mode, downloads and verifies the speech model, and runs incant doctor.

To remove everything later:

./uninstall.sh

A PKGBUILD is provided. Note: the current PKGBUILD assumes a populated ~/.cache/sherpa-rs/ from a prior cargo build; until that limitation is removed (see PKGBUILD header), prefer ./install.sh.

makepkg -si

1. Install dependencies

sudo pacman -S pipewire pipewire-alsa gtk4 gtk4-layer-shell wtype wl-clipboard
yay -S dotool   # AUR

2. Build the workspace

cargo build --release
sudo install -Dm755 target/release/incant-daemon  /usr/local/bin/incant-daemon
sudo install -Dm755 target/release/incant         /usr/local/bin/incant
sudo install -Dm755 target/release/incant-overlay /usr/local/bin/incant-overlay

3. Download the speech model (~660 MB, pinned + SHA‑256 verified)

incant-daemon download-model

The model is cached under ~/.cache/incant/models/. Files are downloaded with resume support, so an interrupted download can be restarted.

4. Wire up Hyprland

cp hyprland/incant.conf ~/.config/hypr/

Add to your ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf:

source = ~/.config/hypr/incant.conf

5. Enable the user service

cp systemd/incant-daemon.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now incant-daemon
incant doctor

By default, Incant is in double‑tap‑only mode — a single tap of the hotkey does nothing, which makes it safe to bind to a bare modifier like Alt without breaking Alt+Tab and friends.

If you prefer the classic press‑and‑hold workflow, set use_double_tap_only = false in your config (see below).

The incant CLI talks to the running daemon over a Unix socket (chmod 0600). It is invoked by Hyprland's bind handlers, but is also useful for scripting and debugging:

incant           # Show daemon status
incant press     # Tap (start recording on second tap in double-tap mode)
incant release   # Stop recording (press-and-hold mode only)
incant cancel    # Cancel an in-progress recording or transcription
incant status    # Print the current daemon state
incant ping      # Health check
incant stop      # Stop the daemon
incant doctor    # Run diagnostic checks

Incant looks for ~/.config/incant/config.toml; the file is created with defaults on first run.

# Path to the ONNX model directory.
# Defaults to ~/.cache/incant/models/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-int8
# To use Moonshine Tiny instead (~120 MB, English-only), set a path whose
# basename contains "moonshine":
# model_path = "/home/USER/.cache/incant/models/moonshine-tiny-en-int8"

# Sample rate the model expects. Do not change unless you know why.
sample_rate = 16000

# Unix socket for CLI <-> daemon IPC.
# socket_path = "/run/user/1000/incant/daemon.sock"

# Audio capture buffer size (samples).
buffer_size = 4096

# Text-injection backends, tried in order:
#   wtype   = Wayland virtual_keyboard protocol (preferred)
#   dotool  = uinput-based fallback
#   wl-copy = clipboard fallback (last resort)
output_methods = ["wtype", "dotool", "wl-copy"]

# Show the GTK4 overlay capsule while recording.
show_overlay = true

# ONNX runtime threads (0 = auto).
num_threads = 4

# Minimum recording duration in ms; shorter "presses" are discarded as
# accidental taps (prevents HUD flash on Alt+Tab etc.).
minimum_key_time_ms = 150

# Double-tap lock mode.
double_tap_lock_enabled = true
double_tap_window_ms    = 300

# Default: only react to an explicit double-tap. A single tap never starts
# a recording, so binding a bare modifier (e.g. Alt) is safe.
# Set false to enable press-and-hold dictation.
use_double_tap_only = true

# Sound effect volume (0.0 - 1.0).
sound_volume = 0.3

# Verbose logs; also writes last_recording.wav to ~/.cache/incant/.
debug = false

Incant is a small workspace of three Rust crates communicating over a Unix socket:

                 Hyprland (bind / bindr)
                          │
                          ▼
                    incant (CLI)
                          │  Unix socket IPC (chmod 0600)
                          ▼
                   incant-daemon
                  ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
                  │ Audio capture (cpal + PipeWire) │
                  │ RMS metering → overlay          │
                  │ Press-and-hold state machine    │
                  │ Sound FX (rodio, procedural)    │
                  │ STT (sherpa-onnx + Parakeet)    │
                  │ Text injection (wtype/dotool)   │
                  └─────────────────────────────────┘
                          │
                          ▼
                  incant-overlay
                  (GTK4 layer-shell HUD)

• Daemon won't start — journalctl --user -u incant-daemon -f.
• libsherpa-onnx-c-api.so: cannot open shared object file — the sherpa libs were not installed where the dynamic linker can find them. ./install.sh writes /etc/ld.so.conf.d/incant.conf and runs ldconfig; re-run it if you skipped that step.
• No text appears after release — make sure the focused window accepts virtual‑keyboard input; otherwise the wl-copy fallback will put the transcription on the clipboard.
• No audio captured — systemctl --user status pipewire; check the default source matches your microphone.
• Model missing or corrupted — re-run incant-daemon download-model. Existing files are SHA‑256 verified; any mismatch triggers a re-download.

MIT — see LICENSE.