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The CLI is the open-source dictation engine at github.com/rekody/rekody (MIT). It runs as a daemon in your terminal: hold ⌥ Space anywhere on your desktop, speak, release, and the transcript lands at your cursor.
Rekody running in the terminal, transcribing speech into an editor window.

Dictating from the terminal into any app on your desktop.

Requirements: macOS, Apple Silicon or Intel.
The formula auto-taps from the rekody/rekody tap. Newer Homebrew versions gate third-party taps; if prompted, run:
The tap is only needed while Rekody lives outside homebrew-core. Once it is accepted there, a plain brew install rekody will do.

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One-line installer

No Homebrew needed. The script detects your platform, downloads the precompiled binary, and falls back to building from source if none exists:

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Build from source

The Rust toolchain is pinned in rust-toolchain.toml; rustup picks it up automatically.

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First run

The first run launches the setup wizard: pick a speech-to-text engine, optionally configure LLM cleanup, download the model, and grant the two macOS permissions (Accessibility for the hotkey and injection, Microphone to your terminal). Once set up, the daemon shows a live console: your words stream in as you talk, then the finished text is injected at your cursor.
The Rekody CLI console streaming a transcript live while recording.

The live console: words stream in across multiple lines, the current line bright and the tail dimmed.

macOS attributes microphone access for CLI apps to the parent terminal, so Terminal, iTerm, Warp, or Ghostty shows up in your Microphone permission list instead of Rekody. This is a system-level design, not a bug.

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Check the install

rekody doctor probes the microphone, verifies models on disk, tests each configured provider, and reports the size of your local training dataset.

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Updating

rekody update downloads the latest GitHub release and verifies the tarball against the release’s published SHA256SUMS before installing. It replaces the binary that is actually running, wherever it is installed.

Related topics

Install the appRekodyContributingModels and checksumsconfig.toml reference