Clide

System-wide dictation for macOS. Hold a shortcut, speak, and the text lands in whatever application you were typing in.

shortcut → capture → transcribe → process → insert → history

Read blueprint.md for what Clide is meant to become, and AGENTS.md for how to work on it.

Status: v0.1

The core dictation path is implemented. Rust owns everything native — the microphone, the global shortcut, provider requests, Accessibility insertion, the Keychain, and SQLite. React owns presentation only.

Transcription	Groq (whisper-large-v3-turbo, whisper-large-v3), behind a provider adapter
Processing	Verbatim, Polished (local, deterministic). Rewrite is declared and refused.
Insertion	Accessibility API, falling back to clipboard paste with clipboard restore
History	SQLite with FTS5 full-text search. Text only — audio is never stored.
Credentials	macOS Keychain, bring-your-own-key

Not in this version: file imports, local models, per-app profiles, LLM rewrite, a customisable dashboard grid.

Running it

npm install
npm run app:build -- --debug --bundles app
open src-tauri/target/debug/bundle/macos/Clide.app

Use the bundled app rather than npm run app (Tauri dev) for anything involving permissions: macOS grants microphone and Accessibility access to a bundle identity, and the dev binary does not have a stable one.

On first launch, Clide walks you through microphone access, Accessibility access, your shortcut, and a Groq API key — then has you run one real dictation before opening the dashboard.

Tests

cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml
npm run build   # tsc --noEmit + vite build

Two tests are ignored by default because they touch the real machine:

# writes to your login Keychain
cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml -- --ignored keychain_round_trip

# types into whatever app is focused — focus TextEdit first
cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml -- --ignored insertion_reaches_the_focused_app

Privacy

Dictation audio is written to a temporary file, sent to the configured provider, and deleted as soon as the transaction resolves — with a 120-second window kept only so a failed transcription can be retried without speaking again. History stores text, never recordings. API keys live in the Keychain and are never written to the database, settings, or logs.