A local-first voice-to-action desktop app: press a hotkey, speak, and your words are transcribed and filed as a task, reminder, idea or note — all offline.
EchoNote is a voice-to-action desktop app built around a dead-simple loop: press `Alt + Shift + Space`, say whatever's on your mind, press it again and go back to work. It transcribes what you said and files it as a task, reminder, idea or note — "Remind me to call the dentist tomorrow" becomes an actual reminder with the date. And everything runs locally on the laptop: your voice, your notes and the AI processing never go to a server.
The build story is peak vibe coding. The author doesn't know how Linux apps are made — his words: "claude made this app possible" — and the dev diary shows Claude Code doing serious engineering work. Speech-to-text is whisper.cpp, understanding is Google's Gemma 4 E2B running locally through llama.cpp, storage is SQLite, and the original transcript is saved before the AI processes it, so a note is never lost even if the AI is down. Then the agent kept going: a 2.7-second shortcut delay hunted down to 17–27 ms through a named pipe, Wayland's refusal to register global shortcuts solved with a GNOME custom-shortcut fallback, inference servers cleaned up when the app is killed, and 96 unit tests plus 8 real-model tests plus 7 end-to-end workflows driving the built app with WAV files as the microphone — including a full capture with the network interface down.
First launch downloads about 1.1 GB of models from Hugging Face (CPU-only is fine, GPU acceleration is on the roadmap); after that, no internet needed. The demo screenshots show the real capture screen — a big mic button, the recent list filed into Reference/Idea/Task with transcripts, and "AI: loading…" honestly sitting in the sidebar. Made for the Hacktoberfest "Build for a Friend" weekend challenge, MIT licensed, installs in about five minutes.
Note: This project is curated by the VibeFix editors from public sources. All rights belong to the original creator.