A desktop dictation app that never phones home

What it does

Murmure is a desktop speech-to-text application built with Tauri that runs NVIDIA’s Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 model entirely on your own hardware. It transcribes voice input into text across 25 European languages and can pass the output through an LLM for translation, grammar fixes, or formatting. The project is released under the GNU AGPL v3 and collects zero telemetry.

The interesting bit

Most STT tools either phone home or bury their models inside a browser tab. Murmure packages a 600-million-parameter transformer into native builds for Windows, Linux, and macOS, with a deliberate offline-first design. Recent additions like a CLI import mode and an HTTP API suggest it is slowly morphing from a consumer dictation tool into a local transcription backend you can script against.

Key highlights

• Runs the Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 model fully offline; no network required for transcription
• Supports 25 European languages, from Maltese to Russian
• Cross-platform native builds for Windows, Linux, and macOS (both Intel and Apple Silicon)
• Optional LLM post-processing for translation, grammar correction, or prompt formatting
• AGPL v3 licensed; the codebase is open for inspection and modification

Caveats

• macOS users upgrading from version 1.6.0 face a tedious permission reset cycle the author admits is “painful”
• On Linux GNOME, push-to-talk is unavailable and you must manually configure OS-level shortcuts before the app responds
• The HTTP API is still tagged as experimental, and full LLM Connect service integration remains on the backlog

Verdict

Worth a look if you want a private, local dictation layer that works across operating systems. Skip it if you need mature mobile support or a fully stabilized API right now.