Plauder

WhisperFlow-style voice dictation for Linux — Groq Whisper + LLM formatting, pastes into any focused window.

Press a keybind, speak, press again — the text appears in whatever window has focus. Transcription via Groq's Whisper Large V3 Turbo, optional clean-up via a Groq LLM, history kept locally in SQLite.

[Press shortcut] → Recording…
[Speak]          "hello world this is a test"
[Press shortcut] → Processing…
[Output]         "Hello world, this is a test."

Features

• Fast transcription — Whisper Large V3 Turbo on Groq, sub-second for short clips
• Clean output — Groq LLM adds punctuation/casing without rewriting your words
• Never swallows text — truncated or refusal-style LLM output is detected and replaced with the raw transcript
• Tiny upload — opusenc 16 kbps VOIP, ~4 KB per second of audio (~10× smaller than the previous ffmpeg/48k pipeline)
• Modern GUI — Tauri 2 + React 19 + Tailwind v4, dark UI, system tray, lives in ~/.local/share/plauder
• Verlauf tab — virtualized history list with git-style word diff between Whisper raw and LLM formatted output, character-level change percentage, anomaly badges (refusal / truncated / inflated)
• Editable corrections — teach Plauder by adding "Whisper hears X → I meant Y" pairs; applied to every future LLM call
• Live Logs tab — last 100 lines by default, scroll up to auto-load older
• API-key reveal — Eye/EyeOff toggle in Settings instead of a permanent password field
• 50+ languages — auto-detect or pin via the Settings/tray dropdown
• Keybind-driven — works with i3/sway/Hyprland/sxhkd/dwm

Installation

Pre-built .deb / .AppImage

Every tagged release ships a Debian package and an AppImage on the Releases page.

# .deb
sudo apt install ./plauder_*_amd64.deb

# AppImage
chmod +x plauder_*.AppImage
./plauder_*.AppImage

From source

git clone https://github.com/chukfinley/plauder.git
cd plauder
./install.sh

The installer builds the Tauri + React GUI in release mode, copies everything to ~/.local/share/plauder/, drops a plauder symlink in ~/.local/bin/, sets up the systemd user service, and prompts for your Groq API key.

Requirements

• Linux with X11 or Wayland
• PipeWire or PulseAudio (pw-record)
• Rust/Cargo + Node.js + pnpm (build from source only)
• WebKitGTK 4.1 dev libs (Tauri runtime)
• Groq API key — console.groq.com/keys

System dependencies

Required at runtime:

• yad — tray icon
• xdotool — paste into focused window
• xclip — clipboard
• opusenc (recommended) or ffmpeg — audio compression
• jq curl sqlite3
• pw-record (PipeWire)

Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt install yad xdotool xclip opus-tools ffmpeg jq curl pipewire sqlite3 \
  libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev build-essential libssl-dev libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev
# build-from-source extras:
sudo apt install cargo nodejs && sudo npm install -g pnpm

Arch/Manjaro:

sudo pacman -S yad xdotool xclip opus-tools ffmpeg jq curl pipewire sqlite3 \
  webkit2gtk-4.1 libappindicator-gtk3 librsvg
# build-from-source extras:
sudo pacman -S rust nodejs pnpm

Configuration

Edit ~/.local/share/plauder/.env or use the Settings tab in the GUI:

GROQ_API_KEY="gsk_…"     # Required
LANGUAGE="de"            # Optional: auto-detect if empty
MIC_SOURCE=""            # Optional: device id from `pactl list sources short`
NOTIFICATIONS="true"
TRAY_ICON="true"
SYSTEM_PROMPT="…"        # Optional: override the LLM clean-up prompt

Keybindings

Bind your WM/DE to run plauder:

WM/DE	Config	Example
i3 / sway	~/.config/i3/config	bindsym $mod+r exec plauder
Regolith	~/.config/regolith3/i3/config.d/91_custom	bindsym $mod+r exec plauder
Hyprland	~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf	bind = SUPER, R, exec, plauder
sxhkd	~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc	super + r plauder
dwm	config.h	{ MODKEY, XK_r, spawn, SHCMD("plauder") }

Usage

1. systemctl --user start plauder (tray daemon)
2. Press your keybind → recording
3. Speak
4. Press keybind again → transcribe + paste

GUI tabs

• Verlauf — every recording, expandable card with Whisper raw / LLM formatted / your correction, git-style word diff, anomaly badges, % changed, copy/delete
• Korrekturen — add and edit "Whisper hears X → I meant Y" rules used by every future LLM call
• Logs — live debug log, last 100 lines, scroll up for older
• Einstellungen — API key (with show/hide), mic, language, notifications, tray, system prompt

Tray menu

• Toggle Recording
• Einstellungen & Historie (opens GUI)
• Select Microphone
• Select Language
• Quit

How it works

Keybind → pw-record 16 kHz mono WAV → /tmp
Keybind → opusenc 16 kbps VOIP (~16 ms encode, ~4 KB/s upload)
        → POST /audio/transcriptions  (Whisper Large V3 Turbo)
        → POST /chat/completions      (gpt-oss-20b, low reasoning effort)
        → xdotool pastes into the focused window
        → SQLite history.db gets the row + timings

Anti-swallow safeguard: if the LLM finishes with finish_reason=length, returns less than 60 % of the input, or matches one of the known refusal patterns ("kann ich nicht", "I cannot", "as an AI", …), Plauder pastes the raw Whisper transcript instead.

Files after install

~/.local/share/plauder/
├── plauder-gui              # Tauri release binary
├── voice-input.sh           # toggle script (recording + transcribe + paste)
├── voice-input-daemon.sh    # tray daemon
├── select-mic.sh / select-language.sh
├── .env                     # config (API key, language, mic)
├── history.db               # SQLite history + corrections
└── icons/                   # tray + window icons

~/.local/bin/plauder         # symlink → voice-input.sh
~/.config/systemd/user/plauder.service

Development

Tauri 2 app: React/Vite frontend in src/, Rust backend in src-tauri/.

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev                            # hot-reload
pnpm tauri build --no-bundle              # binary → src-tauri/target/release/plauder-gui
pnpm tauri build                          # full .deb + .rpm + AppImage bundle

Data lives in the same history.db and .env the shell scripts use, so the GUI and CLI stay in sync.

Releases

Push a vX.Y.Z tag and the GitHub Action builds .deb, .rpm, and .AppImage and attaches them to a new release automatically.

git tag v0.2.0
git push origin v0.2.0

Uninstall

systemctl --user stop plauder && systemctl --user disable plauder
rm -rf ~/.local/share/plauder ~/.local/bin/plauder
rm ~/.config/systemd/user/plauder.service

Troubleshooting

• No tray icon — install yad, make sure your DE has a system tray
• Empty / wrong transcript — pin the language in Settings (auto-detect can miss for short clips)
• Slow — mostly Groq upload + LLM round-trip; with opusenc 16 kbps a 10 s clip uploads in < 200 ms on WiFi
• Tray panic on launch — make sure ~/.local/share/plauder/icons/32x32.png exists; the binary loads it via include_bytes! at build time

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Credits

• Groq — fast Whisper + LLM inference
• OpenAI Whisper — transcription model
• Tauri — Rust + WebView shell