About

We think faster
than we type.

Kudu is a free, open-source dictation app for people who’d rather say it than type it, and who don’t want their voice on someone else’s server to do it.

Most of us speak at around 150 words a minute and type at 40. Dictation should close that gap, but the built-in kind writes down every “um”, and the polished kind sends your voice to the cloud.

Kudu does both halves on your own computer: it hears you, writes what you meant, and formats it for the app you’re in. Then it gets out of the way.

Principles

Four things we won’t trade

Private by construction

Not a privacy setting: there is simply no server. Your voice is processed where it’s spoken.

Fast enough to forget

Text lands a moment after you let go. If you notice the wait, it’s too slow.

Writes like you

Your slang in chat, your sign-off in email, your casing in code. Cleaned up, never flattened.

Yours to change

MIT licensed. Fork it, read it, fix it, ship your own. No lock-in, no subscription.

How it works

From breath to text, in five steps

All five run on your computer, usually in well under a second.

  1. 1

    Hear

    Audio from your microphone, only while you hold the key, kept in memory.

  2. 2

    Transcribe

    An on-device speech model turns it into words, on the Neural Engine or the CPU.

  3. 3

    Clean up

    Fillers, repeats and “no wait” corrections are removed by fast, predictable rules.

  4. 4

    Format

    Lists, dates, mentions and code are laid out for the app you’re in.

  5. 5

    Type

    The finished text is inserted where your cursor is. Nothing is left behind.

Under the hood

Open models, running locally

Kudu stands on excellent open work. Thank you to everyone behind it.

Speech on Mac

NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2, on the Apple Neural Engine through FluidAudio

Formatting on Mac

Apple’s on-device Foundation Models (macOS 26 and later)

Speech on Windows and Linux

Parakeet (Accurate) or Moonshine Base (Compact), on the CPU

Formatting on Windows and Linux

Optional Qwen2.5 0.5B or 1.5B, run locally with llama.cpp

Made in the open, for everyone.

Kudu is an independent project. Issues, ideas and pull requests are all welcome.

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