_     _
 __      __| |__ (_)___  _ __ ___
 \ \ /\ / /| '_ \| / __|| '__/ __|
  \ V  V / | | | | \__ \| |  \__ \
   \_/\_/  |_| |_|_|___/|_|  |___/

  speak. type. done.

whisrs

Voice for the Linux desktop, written in Rust: dictation, read-aloud, and voice-driven LLM commands.

Speech-to-text for Wayland, X11, Hyprland, Sway, Niri, GNOME, and KDE. Press a hotkey, speak, and your words appear at the cursor, in any app, any window manager, any desktop environment. Select text and whisrs reads it aloud (text-to-speech via Groq, OpenAI, Deepgram, or a local sidecar). Or say what you want and an LLM writes it at your cursor, or talk to a coding agent: Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex or GitHub Copilot works on it and answers out loud. Supports cloud transcription (Groq, Deepgram, OpenAI) and fully offline local transcription via whisper.cpp. Fast, private, open source. Record your mic and the system audio too: both become one timestamped Markdown transcript, kept in its own folder.

---

Why whisrs?

Dictation tools like Wispr Flow and Superwhisper are not available on Linux. whisrs fills that gap natively: a single Rust daemon with layout-aware keyboard injection (AltGr and dead keys included), per-compositor window tracking, and pluggable backends. What started as a dictation tool has grown into a voice layer for the whole desktop: speech in (dictation, voice commands), speech out (read any selection aloud), one hotkey each.

---

Installation

Quick install (Linux x86_64 / aarch64)

curl -sSL https://y0sif.github.io/whisrs/install.sh | bash

The install script downloads the latest prebuilt tarball, installs whisrs/whisrsd to /usr/local/bin, and runs interactive setup.

Pin a specific version with WHISRS_VERSION=v0.1.10 or use the cloud-only minimal build with WHISRS_MINIMAL=1. Re-run the same command later to upgrade.

To build from source instead (including custom feature flag combos or unsupported architectures), use cargo install whisrs --locked or the whisrs-git AUR package.

After install, press your hotkey to start recording, press again to stop. Text appears at your cursor.

GPU acceleration (local whisper.cpp)

Prebuilt tarballs run whisper.cpp on the CPU. Building with a GPU feature (cargo install whisrs --features vulkan, or cuda / hipblas) moves the model onto your GPU and cuts dictation latency from seconds to near-instant. It needs the toolkit's development packages, not just the GPU driver; see docs/gpu-acceleration.md for per-distro packages, how to verify the build, and the systemd pitfall when upgrading an existing install.

Pre-built binary (manual)

The Quick install above already does this; this section is for users who want to install the tarball by hand.

Each tagged release publishes tarballs on GitHub Releases with both whisrs and whisrsd plus the contrib files (udev rule, systemd unit, man pages).

# Pick the artifact for your arch + variant:
ARCH=x86_64   # or aarch64
curl -sSL -o whisrs.tar.gz https://github.com/y0sif/whisrs/releases/latest/download/whisrs-linux-${ARCH}.tar.gz

# Or the minimal build (cloud backends only, no whisper.cpp; keeps tray, overlay, recordings and MCP):
# curl -sSL -o whisrs.tar.gz https://github.com/y0sif/whisrs/releases/latest/download/whisrs-linux-${ARCH}-minimal.tar.gz

tar xzf whisrs.tar.gz
sudo install -m755 whisrs whisrsd /usr/local/bin/
sudo install -m644 contrib/99-whisrs.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
# On NixOS/Guix, point the rule's ACL fallback at your setfacl:
# command -v setfacl >/dev/null && sudo sed -i "s|/usr/bin/setfacl|$(command -v setfacl)|g" /etc/udev/rules.d/99-whisrs.rules
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger
sudo usermod -aG input $USER   # log out / back in for the group change
whisrs setup

Variant	Architectures	Includes local whisper.cpp
whisrs-linux-{x86_64,aarch64}.tar.gz	x86_64, aarch64	yes (full build)
whisrs-linux-{x86_64,aarch64}-minimal.tar.gz	x86_64, aarch64	no (cloud backends only)

Arch Linux (AUR)

yay -S whisrs-bin    # prebuilt release binaries, tracks tagged versions

whisrs-bin installs the same tarball as the Quick install above, so upgrades follow releases and there is no Rust toolchain or whisper.cpp build. To build from source and follow main instead, use yay -S whisrs-git — it rebuilds on every upstream commit and needs cargo, clang and cmake.

After install, run whisrs setup to configure your backend, API keys, permissions, and keybindings.

Cargo

cargo install whisrs

Requires system dependencies: alsa-lib, libxkbcommon, clang, cmake.

After install, run whisrs setup.

Nix

nix profile install github:y0sif/whisrs

Or add to your flake inputs:

inputs.whisrs.url = "github:y0sif/whisrs";

Manual install

1. Dependencies

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S base-devel alsa-lib libxkbcommon clang cmake

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install build-essential libasound2-dev libxkbcommon-dev libclang-dev cmake

# Fedora
sudo dnf install gcc-c++ alsa-lib-devel libxkbcommon-devel clang-devel cmake

2. Build

git clone https://github.com/y0sif/whisrs
cd whisrs
cargo install --path .

3. Setup

whisrs setup

以上为 README 的开头部分。其余内容请阅读原文。 查看完整 README ↗