Work · Build · October 2026
Talk instead of type, offline.
Murmur is a free, open-source dictation app: hold a key, speak, let go, and your words land where you were typing. Nothing you say leaves your computer.
What it does
Hold the push-to-talk key, say what you'd type, and let go. Murmur turns your speech into text on your own machine and puts it where your cursor is, in any app. There's no account and no cloud service.
It runs on Windows and Mac and updates itself from inside the app.
How it's built
It's written in Rust. Speech recognition runs locally: with the model loaded it uses about 1.2 GB of memory, and on 4 cores it turns 10 seconds of speech into text in about 1.7 seconds. It's MIT-licensed and the code is public.
What broke, and what I'd change
I shipped live text, words appearing while you speak, and then took it out. It was smooth on an idle machine and lagged under a real workload, so it went.
The demo film taught me something too. In the first cut the narration ran about three quarters of a second ahead of the app's own on-screen indicator. In the second, every line is placed by the indicator in the footage, and none of the waiting is cut. Cutting it would make the app look faster than it is.
The latest release, v0.5.2, cleared the whole improvements list, including the Windows fixes.
Want something like this for your business? Tell me what's eating your week.