Utter

What it is

Utter is dictation that runs on your own Windows 10 or 11 PC. Press Right Ctrl (or your mouse's side button), talk, and press it again: your words are typed into whatever app has focus. Speech recognition runs locally with Qwen3-ASR 1.7B, so your audio never leaves your PC.

It has two parts in this repo:

• The dictation client (dictation/) runs in the background. It records while you hold or toggle the shortcut, sends the audio to the speech model on your PC, corrects the result and types it.

• The Utter window (utter/) shows what the client is doing and lets you change it.

Related MCP server: Meetings MCP Server

What it's for

Anything you would otherwise type: messages, email, documents, notes, prompts for AI tools, comments in your code editor. For example, you say "um, so can you send the deck to cloud before Friday, no wait, Thursday" and Utter types "Can you send the deck to Claude before Thursday?"

• Learns from your corrections. After a dictation, Utter watches the text field for 90 seconds. If you fix a misheard name ("Brightloop" for "bright loop"), the fix goes into your dictionary. It only learns distinctive words (names, brands, acronyms) that still sound like what was heard, and skips terminals and password managers.

• AI dictionary review (optional). When you are idle, a stronger model reads batches of new dictations through your Codex CLI login and learns misheard terms ("codecs" for "Codex"). A fix is accepted only if it quotes the transcript and clears a confidence threshold. This sends dictation text to OpenAI, so it is off until you turn it on in Settings > Dictation.

• Dictionary matched by sound. Words in your dictionary replace sound-alike mistakes ("git hub" becomes "GitHub"); replacement rules handle fixed phrases, spoken email addresses and filler words.

• AI polish (optional). A local model (LM Studio or Ollama) cleans up long dictations: removes fillers and false starts, fixes punctuation, and keeps your words. A guard falls back to the original text if the model starts answering instead of editing.

• Use a stronger PC's speech engine over Tailscale. A laptop can run only the client and send audio to the speech server on your desktop.

• Insights: this month's words, your speaking speed against your typing, time saved, what Utter corrected and learned, words per day and the apps you dictate into.

• Notetaker: records a meeting (your microphone as you, what the PC plays as everyone else), transcribes it on the same local engine, then writes a title, overview, key points and next steps. Audio is never saved. Utter can offer to start it when a Google Meet, Zoom or Teams call begins.

• MCP: Codex, Claude Code, Pi or LM Studio can search what you dictated and what was said in your meetings, read-only.

Evidence

• 205 offline tests cover the window (79), the dictation client (119) and the bundled diagnosis skill (7): settings, the dictionary formats, learning from edits, the AI polish guard, insights, the Notetaker and the MCP tools. They need no speech server.

• The English dictionary matcher was checked once, when the Chinese-language branch was removed: it gave the same results as before on 65 recorded matching cases. The main cases are kept as a test.

• Limits: the tests do not use a microphone or type into real apps. Speech accuracy depends on Qwen3-ASR, your microphone and your accent, and has not been measured for this repo.

How it is designed

The window and the client share files, not code paths. Utter imports the client's own modules for every file it reads or writes (utter/dictation.py), so each format has one definition. The only file Utter owns is the Notetaker's store, %APPDATA%\Utter\notetaker.sqlite3. For meetings, Utter talks to the speech server directly, with the same WebSocket messages the client sends.

flowchart LR
  subgraph Window["Utter window (utter/)"]
    UI["Web UI<br/>utter/web"] -- "pywebview bridge" --> API["api.py"]
    API --> ENGINE["engine.py<br/>status and control"]
    API --> STATS["stats.py<br/>insights"]
  end

  subgraph Files["Client data files (dictation/)"]
    SETTINGS[("appdata/settings.json")]
    STATUS[("appdata/status.json")]
    ARCHIVE[("transcripts.sqlite3")]
    HOT[("hot*.txt dictionary")]
  end

  subgraph Client["Dictation (dictation/)"]
    CLIENT["Dictation client<br/>hotkeys, mic, typing, learning"]
    SERVER["Speech server<br/>Qwen3-ASR 1.7B"]
  end

  API -- writes --> SETTINGS
  API -- edits --> HOT
  ENGINE -- reads --> STATUS
  STATS -- reads --> ARCHIVE
  SETTINGS -- "applied within 1 s" --> CLIENT
  CLIENT -- "every 3 s" --> STATUS
  CLIENT -- "each dictation" --> ARCHIVE
  HOT -- "reloaded on change" --> CLIENT
  CLIENT -- "audio over WebSocket" --> SERVER
  SERVER -- "recognised text" --> CLIENT
  ENGINE -- "start / stop scripts" --> CLIENT

For example, when you switch on Dictation sounds, the page calls api.set_setting, which uses the client's util/app_settings.py to write appdata/settings.json. The client checks that file every second, turns sounds on, and reports the new state in appdata/status.json, which Utter reads for the banner.

Product decisions are in docs/decision-surfaces.md. The logo is drawn by assets/make_icon.py. The launch page in site/ is published to GitHub Pages by .github/workflows/pages.yml. skills/utter-stabilise/ is an agent skill for diagnosing dropped or silent dictation.

Privacy

License

MIT, see LICENSE. The dictation client is a fork of CapsWriter-Offline by Haujet Zhao (MIT); speech recognition uses Qwen3-ASR. The common-word list dictation/util/hotword/common_en.txt is derived from wordfreq word frequencies by Robyn Speer and is under CC BY-SA 4.0.

To install, paste this into a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex) on your PC:

Install Utter on this Windows PC. Follow https://github.com/sz-747/utter-public/blob/main/INSTALL.md step by step: clone the repo, set up the Python environment, download the speech model, and create the shortcuts. Ask me before anything that needs admin rights. Finish with the checks at the end of the guide and tell me what passed.

AGENTS: READ THIS TO INSTALL, CONFIGURE, RUN AND TEST UTTER