VoxCtrl v0.5.5

What's new in 0.5.1

A Bug Report page, so testing the new Windows builds does not
require a GitHub account.

0.5.0 shipped VoxCtrl's first Windows build, and this release adds
the Windows GPU build beside it. Both were built by one person on
one machine — so the thing they needed most was a way for anyone
else to say what broke.

Settings → Bug Report

Describe the problem and press a button. VoxCtrl gathers the log,
your OS and hardware, which build you are running and what it can
offload to the GPU, and your settings — then sends it, files it on
GitHub, saves it to a file, or drafts an email, whichever you pick.
The one-click route needs no GitHub account.

It is opt-in in the strongest sense: nothing runs at startup, on a
timer, or in the background, and the page shows you the entire
report before anything leaves your machine. What is in the preview
is what gets filed; there is no fuller version behind it.

What never travels: anything you dictated, any audio, any API key or
access token, your username, hostname or IP address, any file path,
your custom vocabulary, snippets or prompts, and the labels,
commands and URLs of your output targets. Redaction works from an
allowlist rather than a blocklist, and a test walks the real config
and fails the build naming any setting nobody has classified — so a
setting added later cannot leak into a public issue by being
forgotten.

Full detail, including how to check all of it yourself:
docs/bug_reports.md.

Notes

Reports are rate-limited — five a day, twenty a month, duplicates
refused — and saving a report to a file is never limited, so a real
bug always has a way out.

The installers are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen will warn
that the publisher is unknown.

Downloads

Pick the build for your platform and GPU:

Platform	File suffix	GPU required
Linux	-linux-x86_64-vulkan.AppImage	None — GPU used if present
Windows	-windows-x86_64.exe	None
Windows (GPU)	-windows-x86_64-webgpu.exe	Any Direct3D 12 GPU

There is one Linux build now. The Vulkan AppImage accelerates
any NVIDIA/AMD/Intel GPU through the host Vulkan driver and runs on
the CPU when there is no Vulkan device, so it replaces the separate
CPU AppImage rather than sitting beside it — the same file is right
whether or not you have a GPU. If you were running the CPU AppImage,
VoxCtrl's own updater will move you onto this one; nothing to do.

To keep it on the CPU regardless, set Settings → Engine → Device
to CPU. Worth doing if your only Vulkan device is a software
rasterizer such as Mesa's lavapipe, which is slower than the CPU
backend.

The Linux .deb now requires libvulkan1, which the package
manager pulls in for you.

The Windows builds are NSIS installers. Neither is code-signed
yet, so SmartScreen will warn that the publisher is unknown: choose
More info → Run anyway.

The Windows GPU build accelerates the Moonshine speech
engine on any Direct3D 12 GPU — NVIDIA, AMD or Intel — through ONNX
Runtime's WebGPU provider. Select Moonshine in Settings → Engine;
the tab says which backend the build actually has. Whisper.cpp still
runs on the CPU on Windows either way, because its only GPU path
here is ggml's Vulkan backend, which does not register on Windows
MSVC static builds. If your GPU is not usable the app says so in the
log and falls back to the CPU rather than pretending.

Windows — first run

Windows 10 21H2 or newer, or Windows 11. Everything VoxCtrl needs is
in the installer; WebView2 ships with Windows 11 and the installer
fetches it on older builds.

Two things are worth knowing before the first dictation:

• Microphone access. Windows denies it silently. If dictation
  produces nothing, check Settings → Privacy & security →
  Microphone and allow desktop apps.
• Global shortcuts arrive through a Windows keyboard hook, so
  every gesture works — but Windows does not deliver keys to it
  while an elevated application has focus, or on the UAC prompt and
  lock screen. Shortcuts do not fire there, and dictated text cannot
  be typed into an elevated window unless VoxCtrl is elevated too.

Linux — first run

Needs glibc 2.35 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04+, Linux Mint 21+, Debian
12+, Fedora 36+, Arch). Nothing has to be installed first — not
even libfuse2.

chmod +x VoxCtrl_*-linux-x86_64*.AppImage
# Optional: installs the desktop entry and text-injection helpers.
# Global shortcuts need no permissions — your desktop handles them.
./VoxCtrl_*-linux-x86_64*.AppImage --install
# Launch the application
./VoxCtrl_*-linux-x86_64*.AppImage

What's Changed

• fix: major bug when swapping STT engines durring runtime. by @JRufer in #102
• Version v0.5.5 by @JRufer in #106
• Feature: Adding VoxCPM2 TTS support. by @JRufer in #104

Full Changelog: v0.5.4...v0.5.5