Amical

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Table of Contents

• ⬇️ Download
• 🔮 Overview
• ✨ Features
• 🔰 Tech Stack
• Local Development
• 🤗 Contributing
• 🎗 License

⬇️ Download

Homebrew (macOS)

brew install --cask amical

🔮 Overview

Local-first AI Dictation app.

Amical is an open source AI-powered dictation and note-taking app that runs entirely on your machine. Powered by Whisper for speech-to-text and open source LLMs for intelligent processing, Amical gives you the power of AI dictation with complete privacy.

Context-aware dictation that adapts to what you're doing: drafting an email, chatting on Discord, writing prompts in your IDE, or messaging friends. Amical detects the active app and formats your speech accordingly.

✨ Features

✔︎ - Done, ◑ - In Progress, ◯ - Planned

🚀 Super-fast dictation with AI-enhanced accuracy ✔︎

🧠 Context-aware speech-to-text based on the active app ✔︎

📒 Smart voice notes → summaries, tasks, structured notes ◑

🔌 MCP integration → voice commands that control your apps ◯

🎙️ Real-time meeting transcription (mic + system audio) ◯

🔧 Extensible via hotkeys, voice macros, custom workflows ✔︎

🔐 Privacy-first: works offline, one click setup of local models in-app ✔︎

🪟 Floating widget for frictionless start/stop with custom hotkeys ✔︎

🔰 Tech Stack

• 🎤 Whisper
• 🦙 Ollama
• 🧑‍💻 Typescript
• 🖥️ Electron
• 🎨 TailwindCSS
• 🧑🏼‍🎨 Shadcn
• 🔒 Better-Auth
• 🧘‍♂️ Zod
• 🐞 Vitest
• 🌀 Turborepo

Local Development

These steps run the desktop app, which currently supports macOS and Windows. Linux is not supported because the app does not yet have a Linux native helper.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 24.x
• pnpm 10.15.0 (the version pinned in package.json)
• CMake 3.20 or later
• macOS: Xcode or the Xcode Command Line Tools with Swift 5.9 or later (xcode-select --install). Local Whisper transcription requires macOS 15 or later.
• Windows: Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools with the Desktop development with C++ workload, plus the .NET 8 SDK. Git Bash is recommended because some development scripts use POSIX utilities.

Set up the repository

Clone with submodules so the Whisper sources are available:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/amicalhq/amical.git
cd amical

If you already cloned without --recurse-submodules, initialize them now:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Enable Corepack so it uses the pinned pnpm version, install dependencies, and download the Node.js binary used by the local Whisper worker:

corepack enable
pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
pnpm --filter @amical/desktop download-node

pnpm install compiles the native Whisper addon, so it can take a few minutes. It also applies the repository's patches inside the whisper.cpp submodule. Seeing that submodule marked as modified in git status afterward is expected.

Start the desktop app