YazSes

YazSes is offline, on-device voice dictation. Hold a key (Space by default), speak, release — your words are transcribed locally and typed into whatever app has focus. No cloud, no API key, no subscription; nothing leaves your machine.

Features:

• Offline speech-to-text with faster-whisper (CPU, int8) — no GPU needed
• Voice commands for editors and terminals: "undo that", "save file", "go to line 42", "run the tests", "rename this to user_id"
• Personal vocabulary and multi-step macros
• Works in any focused text field — editors, browsers, terminals, chat

INSTALL — all four commands are required. A snap cannot connect its own interfaces, and the daemon starts and looks healthy without them; it simply never hears you, or never sees the key.

sudo snap install yazses
sudo snap connect yazses:audio-record
sudo snap connect yazses:raw-input
yazses setup

• audio-record — the microphone. Without it, dictation hears nothing.
• raw-input — the hold-to-talk key, read from /dev/input/event*. Without it the hotkey does nothing at all.
• yazses setup — provisions the rest, and re-checks both interfaces.

THEN, TO START DICTATING

yazses doctor (reports anything still missing)
yazses mic-level --set (tune the silence gate to your voice, ~4 s)
yazses start (hold Space, speak, release)

First run downloads the speech model (~250 MB–1 GB): one internet connection, then everything after that is offline. Config and models live under ~/snap/yazses/. To remove: sudo snap remove yazses

BEFORE YOU INSTALL

• Architecture: stable is amd64 today. On arm64, run "sudo snap install yazses --edge" (one release behind) or install with pipx.
• Session: this is a strictly-confined snap and keystroke injection works on X11 sessions. For Wayland, or for full input access, install via pipx instead: https://pypi.org/project/yazses/
• A snap ships a fixed set of libraries, so features cannot be added to it later. Included: dictation, voice commands, tray, overlay, Meeting Mode with speaker diarization, the Parakeet English engine, spoken read-back. Not included, and needing a pipx install instead: Cocktail Filter, offline LLM cleanup, Glance-Type, prosody-aware punctuation.

Docs: https://mskazemi.com/yazses/
Issues: https://github.com/MSKazemi/yazses/issues