Cadence

Offline speech for Linux — hold Right Ctrl to dictate into any app, or hold Left Ctrl and tap Right Ctrl to hear the clipboard read aloud. Nothing is sent to the cloud.

Cadence is a small Rust tray app for offline speech. Hold Right Ctrl and it records, streams audio to a local Whisper server, and types at your cursor. Hold Left Ctrl and tap Right Ctrl (or left-click the tray) to read the clipboard aloud with Kokoro on the CPU. No account, no subscription, no network.

Use it when

You want dictation and read-aloud that work in every application — editor, browser, chat, terminal — without handing speech or text to a cloud service.

  • Fully offline: STT and TTS run locally, nothing leaves your machine
  • Types at the cursor in any focused window, Wayland or X11
  • Live streaming dictation — text appears while you are still speaking
  • Clipboard TTS via Kokoro-ONNX (bm_george) on the CPU
  • Hardware-accelerated STT via whisper.cpp on an AMD Radeon iGPU (Vulkan)
  • Free software under the GPL, version 2

Source & full docs on GitHub

Getting it

Cadence is free software. The source is on GitHub, and the repository is the whole distribution — there is no installer, no store listing and no account. 

git clone https://github.com/oisinmcgrath/cadence.git

github.com/oisinmcgrath/cadence