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Show HN: Fono – dictation/assistant for Linux in one Rust binary

A developer released Fono, a dictation and assistant tool for Linux packaged as a single Rust binary. The tool offers transcription, optional LLM cleanup, and assistant capabilities with support for local or cloud backends, aiming to provide a lightweight alternative to existing solutions.

read2 min publishedMay 26, 2026

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](https://fono.page/install) | sh`

Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48280958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48280958)

Points: 1

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