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Shameless plug: A brutally minimalist Linux only, whisper.cpp only app: https://github.com/daaku/whispy

I wanted speech-to-text in arbitrary applications on my Linux laptop, and I realized that loading the model was one of the slowest parts. So a daemon process, which triggers recording on/off using SIGUSR2, records using `pw-record` and passes the data to a loaded whisper model, which finally types the text using `ydotool` turned out to be a relatively simple application to build. ~200 lines in Go, or ~150 in Rust (check history for Rust version).



I'm very curious about the rewrite. Was Rust slowing you down too much?


Just for fun. I like both languages. I thought Rust would be better fit on account of interop with whisper.cpp, but turns out the use of cgo was straight forward in this case. I like that the Go version has minimal 3rd party dependencies compared to the Rust version.


Why Linux only? Isn't Go and Whisper.cpp cross platform?


It relies on `pw-record` for recording audio and `ydotool` for triggering keyboard input. These are Linux specific. I don't know about Windows, but on my Mac I have a not-yet-public Swift + whisper + CoreAudio + Accessibility based solution that provides similar functionality.


That was my guess. Crossplatform Audio input isn't exactly as trivial as using pipewire.




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