Quill - Local Speech-to-Text Dictation
A personal, for-fun macOS fork of VoiceInk — local, on-device speech-to-text dictation powered by whisper.cpp, with its own identity, GitHub-Releases updater, and stable/nightly/dev channels. A hobby project built to learn, credited fully to upstream.
Project Overview
Quill is a personal, for-fun macOS fork of VoiceInk — local speech-to-text dictation powered by whisper.cpp. It is a hobby project built for my own use, to learn, and to enjoy tinkering with a real native SwiftUI app.
What It Actually Is
Quill is not the official app. VoiceInk is GPL-3.0 source, and the GPL grants the right to modify and run your own build — Quill is exactly that. All of the real work here is Beingpax’s: the app, the design, the engineering, the polish. Everything that makes it useful — local Whisper / Parakeet transcription, the paste engine, the dashboard — is upstream VoiceInk. If you want the real thing with support, updates, and a developer who stands behind it, use the official app at tryvoiceink.com and buy a license to support their work.
Quill’s own changes are deliberately thin: rebranded to its own name, bundle id, and icon so it never pretends to be the official app; builds locally with no Apple Developer account (ad-hoc signed); and a custom GitHub-Releases updater with its own stable, nightly, and dev channels.
Distribution
Apple Silicon, macOS 14.4+. Installs through a Homebrew cask tap (brew install --cask quill, plus a nightly channel), with a build-from-source path for Xcode. Because builds are ad-hoc signed and not notarized, first launch is right-click → Open; then grant Microphone and Accessibility and download a model in-app. All three channels install side by side with separate icons and data.
License
GPL-3.0, inherited from VoiceInk. Provided as-is, with no warranty of any kind.