OpenWritr for Windows v0.1.0

OpenWritr for Windows v0.1.0 — First Public Release

Push-to-talk voice-to-text tray app for Windows on ARM (Snapdragon X).
Hold a hotkey, speak, release — the transcript is pasted at your cursor.
Everything runs locally on your machine; nothing leaves the device unless
you turn on optional LLM cleanup.

Three transcription engines, all running locally

Engine	Where it runs	Languages	Latency on 11 s English
Parakeet TDT v3 — CPU INT8 (default)	CPU	25	~160 ms (70× realtime)
Parakeet TDT v3 — NPU INT8	Hexagon NPU	25	~110 ms (105× realtime)
Whisper Large v3 Turbo — NPU	Hexagon NPU	99	~800 ms / 30 s window

NPU runs use Qualcomm AI Engine Direct via onnxruntime-qnn 2.1, with the
encoder context cached on first use. Statically INT8-QDQ-quantized
Parakeet encoder runs entirely on the NPU; transcripts match the CPU
baseline exactly on validation clips.

Features

• Native Windows tray app with Fluent-styled WPF settings dialog
• Animated overlay with live audio-level meter (HiDPI-correct, Mica backdrop)
• Configurable hotkey: any combination of Ctrl / Shift / Alt / Win plus a
  trigger key from Space / Tab / Caps Lock / Scroll Lock / Pause / Insert
  / Right Ctrl / F13..F20
• Auto-paste at cursor with clipboard save/restore
• Soft, warm start/stop audio cues
• Optional LLM cleanup pass via GitHub Copilot (gh auth token) or any
  OpenAI-compatible endpoint — toggle with Alt held during recording
• Reliable hotkey FSM: stops cleanly when any required modifier is
  released; safety auto-stop after max_record_seconds (60 s default)

Install (from source)

git clone https://github.com/trsdn/openwritr-windows.git
cd openwritr-windows
py -3.11-arm64 -m venv .venv
.\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
pip install -r python\requirements.txt

# 640 MB Parakeet INT8 ONNX (default engine)
python python\fetch_model.py

# Optional: 1.6 GB Whisper Large v3 Turbo NPU build from Qualcomm AI Hub
python python\fetch_whisper.py

python python\openwritr.py

A blue microphone icon appears in your system tray. Default hotkey is
Ctrl + Win + Space — hold, speak, release.

What's not in this release

• No pre-built .exe installer yet; the app runs from a Python venv.
  PyInstaller packaging is planned for the next release.
• No auto-update mechanism.
• Code signing: the source is MIT; no signed binaries to distribute yet.
• The 50-sample FLEURS-calibrated Parakeet NPU model is not used at
  runtime — the 8-sample calibration variant proved more stable for
  long-form audio. See scripts/quantize_qdq*.py for the toolchain.

Acknowledgements

• macOS original: trsdn/OpenWritr
• Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 ONNX export: istupakov/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-onnx
• Whisper Large v3 Turbo NPU build: qualcomm/Whisper-Large-V3-Turbo
• onnx-asr for the Parakeet decoding pipeline