Win Dictation — Voice to Text for Windows

A push-to-talk speech-to-text utility for Windows. Press a hotkey, speak, and your words land in whatever app you were just using — fully offline, powered by Whisper.

Quick Download

Download Latest Release (WinDictation.zip)

Extract the ZIP file and run win-dictation.exe. The release includes all required DLLs and a Whisper model.

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Documentation

• User Manual — How to use every feature
• Architecture & Engineering Review — Deep dive into the codebase for developers

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Features

Performance

• Physical-core threading: Uses one thread per physical core for efficient batch transcription
• CPU-only: Optimised for ordinary laptops — no GPU required
• Self-calibrating progress: Learns transcription speed per model and machine, delivering a smooth countdown

User Interface

• Single-surface rendering: No inter-window seams or hairlines — the entire UI is one painted surface
• Dark theme: Calm, elevated card design with hover/press feedback
• Per-monitor DPI awareness: Looks sharp at any display scale
• System tray: Minimise to tray, global hotkey to record

Audio Processing

• Push-to-talk: Press Ctrl+Shift+Space, speak, press again to transcribe
• Multiple microphones: Select from all available input devices
• 16 kHz sample rate: Optimised for Whisper
• Silence trimming: Leading and trailing silence is trimmed before transcription

Quick Start

1. Launch win-dictation.exe
2. Click into wherever you want text, then press Ctrl+Shift+Space
3. Speak, then press Ctrl+Shift+Space again
4. Your words appear in the app you were using

Full instructions in the User Manual.

Controls

• Record/Stop: Click the pill or press Ctrl+Shift+Space
• Hide window: Ctrl+Shift+H
• Pin: Keep window always-on-top
• Copy / Paste / Clear: Text actions below the transcript
• Model / Mic / History: Select from popup menus

Building from Source

Prerequisites

• Windows 10/11
• CMake 3.5+
• Visual Studio 2022 with C++ workload
• SDL2 (included in deps/)

Build Steps

cmake -S . -B build -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" ^
  -DSDL2_DIR="deps/SDL2-2.28.5/cmake"
cmake --build build --config Release

The executable will be at build\bin\Release\win-dictation.exe.

Technical Details

Architecture

Hotkey → SDL Capture → Stop → Batch whisper_full → Text → Auto-paste

1. SDL audio capture: 16 kHz mono recording into memory. CPU stays near idle while recording.
2. Stop-and-transcribe: One whisper_full call processes the full clip at once.
3. Progress estimation: Decayed online least-squares model per machine/model, fused with whisper's chunk progress into a strictly monotonic countdown.
4. Text output: Inserted at cursor with smart spacing, copied to clipboard, and optionally auto-pasted into the window you came from.

Models

Place .bin files in models/ next to the executable, or download them from the Settings screen in-app:

Model	Size	Best for
tiny.en	~75 MB	Fastest — everyday dictation
tiny.en-q8_0	~42 MB	Same speed, smaller file
base.en-q5_1	~59 MB	Good accuracy bump for little cost
base.en	~142 MB	More accurate; still reasonable on two cores
small.en-q5_1	~182 MB	Accurate, but slower
small.en	~466 MB	Most accurate — and slowest

Project Structure

win-dictation/
├── src/                # Application source
│   ├── main.cpp        # Window, painting, interaction, settings, clipboard, popups
│   ├── transcriber.*   # SDL capture, Whisper preload/inference, progress callbacks
│   ├── timing.h        # Learned timing model + live progress estimator
│   ├── history.h       # Session text files, index, pruning
│   ├── downloader.h    # WinHTTP model downloader (background thread)
│   ├── stats.h         # Lifetime usage totals + derived figures
│   ├── settings.h      # INI persistence
│   ├── text_util.h     # Transcript concatenation helpers
│   ├── logging.h       # Timestamped file log
│   └── tests/          # Unit tests (test-core.exe)
├── whisper/            # Whisper.cpp library
├── ggml/               # GGML tensor library
├── models/             # Whisper model files
├── history/            # Saved dictation sessions
├── release/            # Pre-built package
└── CMakeLists.txt      # Build configuration

License

MIT — follows whisper.cpp.

Resources

• User Manual
• Architecture & Engineering Review
• Whisper.cpp
• Model Downloads