{"slug": "show-hn-fono-dictation-assistant-for-linux-in-one-rust-binary", "title": "Show HN: Fono – dictation/assistant for Linux in one Rust binary", "summary": "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.", "body_md": "Hello everybody,\n\nI 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? :)\n\nSo, 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.\n\nAnd 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\n\n... and I guess another nice thing that maybe some of you might want to check out.\n\nI am sure that there are bugs, but I would be happy to squash some if anybody would post issues on GitHub.\n\nAnd obviously, I am putting it here because I would like some honest feedback.\n\nInstall: `curl -fsSL [https://fono.page/install](https://fono.page/install) | sh`\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48280958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48280958)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 1", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-fono-dictation-assistant-for-linux-in-one-rust-binary", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/bogdanr/fono", "published_at": "2026-05-26 15:14:09+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-26 15:39:11.086635+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-products", "ai-tools", "natural-language-processing", "large-language-models", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Fono", "Rust", "Linux", "STT", "LLM", "TTS", "mDSN", "GitHub"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-fono-dictation-assistant-for-linux-in-one-rust-binary", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-fono-dictation-assistant-for-linux-in-one-rust-binary.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-fono-dictation-assistant-for-linux-in-one-rust-binary.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-fono-dictation-assistant-for-linux-in-one-rust-binary.jsonld"}}