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.

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 Comments: 1