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Press a key, speak, text lands at your cursor. Press another, get a spoken answer. Local-first, lightweight voice dictation and assistant for Linux. φ

6 starsRust

Fono – dictation/assistant for Linux in one Rust binary

Name: Fono – dictation/assistant for Linux in one Rust binary
Availability: InStock
Author: bogdan_r

by bogdan_r·May 26, 2026·1 point·1 comment

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AI Analysis

●●SolidNiche GemShip It

One Rust binary does what Electron apps and Python scripts couldn't for Linux dictation.

Strengths

•Single ~22MB binary bundles STT, TTS, LLM cleanup, and Wayland/X11 handling without dependency hell
•MCP integration for voice-controlled coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Forge) is genuinely novel
•Local Whisper by default with cloud fallbacks respects privacy while staying flexible

Weaknesses

•Linux-only limits audience; Windows and macOS users have more dictation options already
•Coding agent integration marked early preview with only 2 GitHub stars suggests very early stage

Post Description

Hello everybody,

I built this tool initially to dictate to my computer because the alternatives weren't very attractive to me. There was an Electron app that was eating a lot of my RAM and had too much GUI. There was another one with lots of separate dependencies and it looks like it's going to take a while to figure it out, and a project that was a bunch of Python scripts. Anyways, without giving it too much consideration, I decided to build my own... how hard can it be? :)

So, the initial idea was that it's supposed to be light, self-contained and easy to use. And that escalated quickly because it turned out to be a very fun and rewarding project.

And I am happy to present to you Fono. * One Rust binary, ~22 MB for CPU and ~60 MB for the GPU build, with basic glibc deps. Inside its belly, it has * Transcription: It does dictation through STT, optionally a cleanup with a small LLM and then it injects the text in the clipboard, at the cursor or both * Assistant: STT -> LLM -> TTS. * You can pick various backends or models for STT, cleanup, assistant, and TTS. I am planning to add more. * It can run completely locally or with different cloud providers. * Run it headless on your big PC, and all local clients find it through mDSN

... and I guess another nice thing that maybe some of you might want to check out.

I am sure that there are bugs, but I would be happy to squash some if anybody would post issues on GitHub.

And obviously, I am putting it here because I would like some honest feedback.

Install: `curl -fsSL https://fono.page/install | sh`