SitRep

A free, local, privacy-first voice notetaker. Press a shortcut, speak, and have your words appear in any text field — entirely offline.

SitRep is a cross-platform desktop application for simple, private speech transcription. Everything happens on your own computer; no audio is ever sent to the cloud.

How It Works

1. Press a configurable keyboard shortcut to start/stop recording (or use push-to-talk mode)
2. Speak your words while the shortcut is active
3. Release and SitRep processes your speech locally
4. Get your transcribed text pasted directly into whatever app you're using

The process is entirely local:

• Silence is filtered using VAD (Voice Activity Detection) with Silero
• Transcription uses your choice of models:
  • Whisper models (Small/Medium/Turbo/Large) with GPU acceleration when available
  • Parakeet V3 — CPU-optimized model with excellent performance and automatic language detection
• Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux

Development Setup

For detailed build instructions including platform-specific requirements, see BUILD.md.

Prerequisites:

• Rust (latest stable)
• Bun package manager

# Start the app (one command)
bun start

bun start is all you need on a fresh clone — it installs frontend dependencies if needed, ensures the Silero VAD model is present (it ships in the repo but is downloaded as a fallback), applies the macOS CMake workaround, and launches the desktop app in development mode.

Equivalent manual steps

# Install dependencies
bun install

# (Fallback only — the model is committed to the repo)
mkdir -p src-tauri/resources/models
curl -o src-tauri/resources/models/silero_vad_v4.onnx https://blob.handy.computer/silero_vad_v4.onnx

# Run in development mode (macOS may need the CMake policy override)
CMAKE_POLICY_VERSION_MINIMUM=3.5 bun run tauri dev

# Build for production
bun run tauri build

Architecture

• Backend (Rust / Tauri 2): audio capture (cpal), VAD (Silero), transcription (whisper-rs / transcribe-rs), global shortcuts, system tray, clipboard paste
• Frontend (React + TypeScript + Tailwind): settings UI, model manager, onboarding, recording overlay

See AGENTS.md for a detailed architecture overview.

Acknowledgments

SitRep is based on Handy by CJ Pais and contributors, used under the MIT License. Transcription is powered by whisper.cpp (Georgi Gerganov), NVIDIA Parakeet, and Silero VAD.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. The original copyright notice from the Handy project is retained as required.