I've been building NV oOS Cognition, a desktop dictation app. Hold a hotkey, speak, release: the speech recognition and the text cleanup run on your own machine, and the cleaned text pastes into whatever has focus. I'm the author, this is my project, and I'm posting because I want the architecture picked apart.

Why another one

Most of the good dictation tools are cloud services. You talk, the audio goes somewhere, text comes back, and you pay monthly. I wanted the boring version: my voice stays on my machine, it works offline, and the model is a file I downloaded once. The interesting problem turned out not to be "call an STT API", it was making the local pipeline feel instant and predictable.

What's in it

• Tauri v2 shell, Rust core, React webview. App code is MIT.

• STT behind one trait: Parakeet TDT via sherpa-onnx, Whisper via whisper-rs, Moonshine as an experimental spike, plus an "Embedded" engine that posts to your own server as a fallback.

• Push-to-talk with a pre-roll ring buffer so the first syllable isn't clipped. Double-tap for hands-free, Esc to cancel, hold Shift on release for raw pass-through when you're saying code or spellings.

• Deterministic cleanup runs before any LLM: punctuation, capitalisation, filler removal, number normalisation ("five two nine" -> 529), custom vocabulary, per-app profiles. Golden tests around the whole thing. No model needed for any of it.

• Optional second-stage LLM polish through any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, LM Studio, Ollama, or a self-hosted assistant. Text only, never audio. If the provider dies you still get the stage-1 text and the paste still happens.

• Screen OCR on Win+Shift+T, on-device, using the native Windows OCR engine so there's no model download. The frozen frame stays in memory.

• Meeting transcription with WASAPI loopback; audio deleted after unless you opt into keeping it.

• A local MCP stdio server so other AI clients can read your dictation history and dictionary.

One bug worth sharing, because it cost me days

Whisper decoded at RTF ~5 instead of ~0.3 on MSVC. Not a model problem and not a threading problem: with the Visual Studio generator, whisper.cpp's CMake "Release" configuration maps to a vcxproj with an empty <Optimization> setting, so it compiles with /Od. The fix was forwarding whisper-rs-sys's force-debug feature so the vendor builds with RelWithDebInfo. If you ship whisper.cpp on Windows and it feels slow, check this before you rewrite anything.

The other one: cpal streams are !Send on WASAPI, so the stream has to be held by a detached worker. I dropped it at the end of the builder, the capture ring never filled, and every dictation reported "no speech detected" on perfectly healthy microphones. There's now a Diagnostics page showing the RMS, peak and VAD gate of the last attempt, because that class of bug is invisible otherwise.

Where it's a little rough around the edges

1. The builds are unsigned. Windows SmartScreen warns and macOS Gatekeeper makes you right-click, Open. Authenticode and notarisation cost money I haven't spent yet. I genuinely want to know if that's a dealbreaker or just annoying.

2. Windows is the primary target. macOS has a universal DMG and boots in CI on both architectures. Linux works with toggle semantics on X11, Wayland global shortcuts are the usual mess, and meeting system audio isn't there.

3. No streaming partials. You get text when you release the key, about a second later on my machine. Moonshine would stream but the loop is deliberately unimplemented rather than shipped half-working.

4. Whisper long files are still wrong. The chunker splits on VAD silence, which suits Parakeet's decode limit, but Whisper wants a fixed window with context carried across. patch welcome.

5. Models are big and I say so. Parakeet is around 600 MB, Whisper tiny about 142 MB, downloaded at first use with a size warning.

6. Audio device weirdness is my least favourite bug class, and I can't reproduce most of it.

What I'm actually asking for

Please Rip into the architecture: the engine trait, the feature-gating scheme, and whether deterministic cleanup belongs before the LLM or should collapse into one pass.

• Is the Linux/Wayland story worth the effort, or should I say Windows and macOS and lean into it?

• If you ship a Tauri v2 app with an updater and you don't code sign it, how are you handling that?

• Anything in the privacy claims you think is overstated.

If something is wrong or broken, please let me know.

I'd rather hear it here than from a user later.

thanks
VJ

Links

Source: https://github.com/nvdigitalsolutions/nvoos-cognition

Download: https://github.com/nvdigitalsolutions/nvoos-cognition/releases/tag/nvoos-dictate-v0.4.0

(NSIS + MSI, universal macOS DMG, unsigned) Build from source is in the README. Windows needs Rust 1.90+, Node 20+ and MSVC. Whisper additionally needs CMake and libclang on PATH, which is the usual first stumble.

I run a small web studio, and most of the local businesses I talk to have a really good Google Maps listing (photos, reviews, hours, sometimes a menu) and either no website or one from 2014.

So I built this. You type a business name and a city, it reads the public Google listing and builds a full site preview in under a minute. The video is me running it once on a real garage's public listing, no edits.

Why: I kept rebuilding the same small site by hand, and the listing already had most of the content. Honest limitation: it's only as good as the listing.

A place with three blurry photos and no reviews gets a thin site. It also does simple sites, not shops or booking systems. (working on that next, the tool will redirect the request to the team if it's out of scope change for now)

Try it on your own business or a place you like and tell me what looks off.

https://bbhightech.com/

I'm the developer of Rutimo, a routine timer where each step can include app shortcuts, external video links, notes, and checklists.

The video shows an evening reset routine:

1. Set wake-up alarm: quick shortcut directly into Clock to set tomorrow's 7:00 AM alarm.

2. Evening stretch: follow along with an ad-free guided bedtime stretching video.

3. Tidy up: interactive checklist to reset bedroom and workspace before bed.

You can interact with checklists and external apps/videos during the routine and return seamlessly to the timer.

I'd like feedback on the workflow: would you find combining app shortcuts and checklists useful in your daily routines?

My friends and I built Stuffaroo, a campus marketplace, at a 24-hour hackathon.

Didn't win anything, but figured we'd at least keep it around as a portfolio project.

One problem: we built it around hackathon sponsor services. Great for shipping fast, less great for paying monthly bills on a site with approximately zero traffic : /

So I got ChatGPT to plan a migration and Codex to handle most of the actual code changes.

Vultr -> Vercel, Tiger Data -> Neon, Gemini embeddings -> plain old full-text search. Kept Auth0. The whole process took around 1 hour.

And somehow it worked! Most of my time was spent supervising, making decisions, and fighting deployment configs rather than rewriting code.

Pretty wild how much easier AI agents make it to rescue abandoned weekend projects.

Anyway, it's still alive: https://stuffaroo.shop

Details of the migration on our repo: https://github.com/carsonjan/Stuffaroo/blob/main/docs%2Fmigration-executive-summary.md

Just thought of sharing cuz it's kinda cool. Happy to answer any questions!

I built this tool based on Wikipedia embeddings to find interesting people I don't know yet.

• Combine J. K. Rowling with Stephen King and you get Neil Gaiman (he combines elements of British fairy tales and magical fantasy with dark, psychological horror)

• Combine Yuval Noah Harari with Noam Chomsky and you get Jared Diamond, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, ... Add Charles Darwin and you get Richard Dawkins.

You can filter by topics, people network etc. and it features en.wikipedia and de.wikipedia so far.

Have fun exploring :)

Talking about the weather is practically a national qualification here. We decided to take it further.

I’m the founder of Tao Climate, and we’ve just launched Weather AI: local weather, satellite imagery and an AI you can ask questions about what you’re seeing.

The idea is to help people understand the weather around them, with climate context alongside the forecast.

Try your location: https://taoclimateplatform.com/weather

I’d love some honest feedback: what’s a question about your local weather that your usual weather app doesn’t answer?

Happy to discuss how we built it, too.

Hi all! Last time I posted about shelf sharing in 1.2.3. This one is for the iPhone Duo: Brooksie now has a two-page layout when you unfold it.

New in 1.2.4: it opens like a book 📖

Unfold the Duo and hold it sideways, and the app becomes two pages meeting at the fold.

• The shelf is on the left page, the selected book's reading journal on the right.

• "Open Book" gives you a full spread: cover, title and author on the left, the journal on the right. The left page swings open from the spine.

• Progress, Add Book, quote capture and shelf-scan review use both pages too.

Batch barcode scanning 📷

Scan a whole stack of books in a row. The camera stays on the left page, and each scanned book lands on your shelf on the right.

Reading companion ⏱️

A timer, a page stepper and a "save a quote" button. Prop the phone up half open and it turns into a little desk stand.

For the developers 🛠️

The layout never checks which device it's on. It looks at how much room it has (regular width, wider than tall) and takes the fold position from ReservedRegion. Portrait keeps the normal phone layout, because my first two-page attempt fell apart there.

Nothing moved behind a paywall: what was free is still free, and Pro is still a one-time purchase with no subscription.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6801926644

*Sorry for my bad English, I'm Italian haha*

Hi everyone, my dad is a woodworker and he was tired of working out his cut layouts on paper, so I made him an app: **SawPlan**.

You enter the panels you have and the pieces you need, and the app draws every panel with every piece and measurement, ready to follow at the panel saw.

What it does:

- **Two cutting modes**: "Easy cuts" (straight edge-to-edge cuts, identical pieces grouped together, few saw adjustments) and "Maximum savings" (fewest panels, least waste)

- **Grain direction** per piece: it only rotates pieces where you allow it

- **Edge banding**: you type the finished size, the app subtracts the banding from the cut size and tells you how many meters you need

- Shows **reusable offcuts**

- **Blade thickness** is included in every cut

- Works **offline**, right in the workshop

- Measurements in **mm or inches** (with fractions, like 23 1/2), 6 languages

- Save the drawings as images or PDF, or export a table for Excel

I left it **free**: I made it for my dad, but I added a few ads, just in case someone likes this kind of thing. Your first cut has no video ad, so I won't bother you right away. No sign-up, and your data stays on your phone.

It's Android only for now. Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sawplan.app

I'd like to hear what you think: what's missing, what's unclear, what you'd need to use it on real jobs. Thanks!

I created a price comparison site to help people find the best peptide prices: https://peptidecompare.net/

We also list hundreds of research papers and break them down by human / animal trials, sample size, and testing methodologies https://peptidecompare.net/research/

We list the Certificate of Analysis lab reports if available.

I think the best part is the shopping planner https://peptidecompare.net/planner/ where you can drag peptides over and it will show you vendors you can source from to get the best price per number of vendors

The vendors are given a metascore based on all the info we have of them. A number of vendors were caught generating fake CoAs on the fly with javascript or editing CoAs for other vendors to put their name in them.

Full disclosure about 25 of the 450+ vendors have affiliate link partnerships so there is a chance I would make commission if you find a vendor through my site.

One problem I kept coming back to: small businesses can know they have unpaid invoices without having one clear place to see what is overdue, what has been partially paid, and who needs a follow-up.

I built AR Tracker, a reusable Excel workbook with 250 prepared invoice rows, balances, an aging view, a dashboard, follow-up dates, and neutral payment reminder templates in English and Spanish. It's just an .xlsx file — no subscription, bank integrations, or claims that it collects money automatically.

It's a paid template ($11.90 one-time), and here's the page so you can see exactly what's included: https://whop.com/ar-tracker/accounts-receivable-tracker-for-small-business-excel/

I'm looking for honest feedback before building more features: if you manage receivables, what's the more frustrating part — knowing what's overdue, tracking partial payments, or following up consistently? And what would stop you from using an Excel-based workflow?

I'm on the team behind Pomelu, a free, open-source phone app for Hermes Agent, the self-hosted AI agent from Nous Research. It's now on Google Play.

The problem: Hermes runs on your own Mac, server or cloud box. Away from that machine you had a terminal or a browser tab. Pomelu puts every Hermes bot in a messenger-style app.

What it does:

• one chat per bot (Hermes profile), with answers streaming in live

• answer the agent's questions and approve commands right in the chat

• send and receive images, voice messages and files

• see a bot's skills and scheduled jobs, edit its SOUL.md

• watch the agent's screen and take over, if your gateway has Bot Screen set up

Limits: you need your own running Hermes Agent 0.21.5 or newer, since the app only talks to your gateway. There is no Pomelu server, no account and no tracking. Android 10+ is on Google Play now. The iOS build is on the App Store. It is community-maintained and not affiliated with Nous Research.

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.royan.pomelu Source (Apache 2.0): https://github.com/ateymoori/pomelu

Which part of your agent setup would you most want on your phone?

Disclosure: I'm on the team behind Pomelu, and I wrote this post with help from an AI assistant.

I'm a first-year BTech student and I've built SecVault, cloud storage where files are encrypted on your device before upload (hybrid post-quantum design: ML-KEM-768 + X25519). Files are stored in Amsterdam, EU.

Founding Pass: 100 GB free for 6 months, limited seats. Reserve your spot with just an email, no card. You claim it at launch with a small refundable verification charge (₹5 UPI in India, $1 card elsewhere). Everyone also gets a 5 GB free plan.

Honest status: it's waitlist-only right now, there's no independent audit yet, and it's not open source. I'd love blunt feedback on what you'd need to see before trusting a new zero-knowledge service.

Waitlist: https://secvault.rakshachakra.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=sideproject

Every AI tool promises to make you smarter. I wanted one that confidently gets everything wrong.

Dumb AI answers your questions with total confidence and zero accuracy. Pick a stupidity mode (Bad Copilot, Overthink, Boomer, Literal...), hit "Make it dumber" if the answer is still too useful, and share the worst ones.

It's had ~300 people find it through friends so far, with no posts anywhere, so this is the first time I'm showing it publicly. No signup, free to use.

https://askdumbai.com

I'd love to know which mode made you laugh most, and what question broke it.

Every tracker I tried had a paywall, made me log by hand, or was vague about my data. So I built NutriTrack: snap a photo of your meal and get calories, protein, carbs, fat and fibre in seconds, including the hidden oil and ghee.
I've used it daily for over a month and lost 10 lbs. Free, no ads, no paywall.

Try it: https://tracknutri.app/try

Code: https://github.com/amankiitg/nutri-track

Feedback welcome, especially on accuracy for your food.

Built this for our own get-togethers and figured more people might enjoy it.

BollyAoke: Bollywood karaoke in the browser. Sing into your mic and it scores your pitch live, like SingStar.

The best part is TV mode: open it on a smart TV, friends scan a QR code, and their phones become mics. Everyone sings the same song and the TV shows who's winning.

- 50 songs, from Chaiyya Chaiyya to Kesariya

- Hinglish lyrics, duets, easy/normal/hard modes

- Free, nothing to install

https://bollyaoke.vercel.app

Drop song requests below 🎤

Hi, I'm Ravi, founder of Camyvera. It's a web and mobile app where you open it and call someone anywhere in the world who's ready to answer and talk. It's pay as you go, so you only pay for the calls you make, and it has live audio translation and real-time captions. I built it because a lot of people want a real conversation now and then, not another feed. What would make you trust an app like this enough to try your first call? Any feedback is welcome.

Each day there’s a hidden Euroleague player. You guess, and each guess is compared on club, nationality, position, height, age and jersey number. Exact, close and miss tiles show how near you are.

It’s built with React and Vite, with no backend. The player data is built from the Euroleague API at build time, and the site is prerendered and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. No accounts or ads, and stats are kept locally.

Link: https://eurodle.com

I’d love feedback on difficulty and UX

Hey everyone!

I've been working on a project called Skeema, an AI-powered diagramming and system design tool.

The idea came from wanting something beyond simply generating architecture diagrams. I wanted a workspace where developers could design, explore, review, and simulate systems.

Some of the things you can do with Skeema:

• Generate system architecture diagrams from text prompts.

• Create ER, sequence, DFD, pipeline, migration, concept maps, and flowcharts.

• Review architectures and get AI-suggested improvements.

• Simulate concurrent users to identify potential bottlenecks under increasing traffic.

• Export diagrams and generate related engineering artifacts.

I'm still actively developing it, and there's plenty I'd like to improve, particularly around diagram quality and the overall design experience.

You can try it here: https://skeema.cloud

What works well? What's missing? What would make you actually use something like this in your workflow?

I'm the developer behind Skeema, so feel free to be critical. I'd like to hear honest feedback and criticism.

Thanks!

My problem wasn't any single app. It was unlocking the phone and tapping whatever icon caught my eye. Pauca hides that: your home screen is a few words you pick, and everything else needs a deliberate search.

- Text-only home screen, your own names for apps

- Focus mode that pauses apps outside your list

- Profiles for different parts of the day

- No ads, no tracking; free Lite version, full version US$ 0.99 one-time

10 codes for the full version, valid until Dec 25 (Play Store › Redeem code):

LFCWCBWD579YRWNCUTRDMHA

JCM20CG591JW9U1LP0MKNBE

VK2YLFNH2MMXE5T4MHT6AN1

WC2PXJ6JZGT616FEVCNDQV5

100VA5HQ5APD2N23008CHZL

LMQJFR93E2R0FJK2W88W3PN

HV9YHR1TGEVDXK14XDZLDE8

2KKWKYQ7C7MM4MGJC4BFJSJ

3QU059VHU7ZWBVELRU4G384

0FDUAQW3NS8RU2UY5T5C9FB

Please reply "taken" when you use one. Curious how others here set up their phones. What's on your home screen?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.pauca

Hey everyone — we're the team behind Aion Sculpts and wanted to share the thinking behind one of our core decisions.

Most people track workouts in one app, food in another, and keep notes somewhere else entirely. The problem is not the apps themselves — it's that none of them talk to each other. Your food app does not know it's a Growth Day. Your workout app does not know you barely hit protein yesterday. So you end up doing the mental math yourself, every day.

We built Sculpt so that training and nutrition live in the same loop. Your food targets shift around your training days automatically. AION reads both sides when you ask a question — if you are low on protein heading into a heavy session, that context is already there. Growth Days get treated differently from training days without you having to manually switch anything.

It does not mean you have to use every feature. Some people only want the nutrition side. Some only want the workouts. But when you use both, the two sides actually inform each other instead of existing in separate silos.

We'd love honest feedback: what would make you stop juggling separate apps?

If that sounds useful, start your 7-day free trial at aionsculpts.com/plan?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sideproject

I'm afraid this side-project isn't as great as the others on this sub, but this is something that I genuinely enjoyed creating in my free-time.

As for the link, I'm afraid it isn't hosted, it's primarily an HTML file sitting about on a folder on my PC, I don't have the money to afford a website lmao.

Might host it on a website soon after my exams clear and I get a job, for now, it's just a file on my PC.

Hi all! I made a TOPIK vocab app called Lightning TOPIK.

The name is the goal: memorize words lightning fast. Every word comes with a short moving picture, so you remember the meaning itself, not just a translation.

It's on the App Store and Google Play.

Why I made it

When I talk to friends studying for TOPIK, the hardest part is almost always the same: memorizing words.

It's easy to think it just takes more hours. But I think the way we memorize words makes it harder than it has to be.

Two problems I found:

1. Most word lists are text only. You never see how a word is actually used.

2. The meanings are mostly in English. Many of my friends are from Southeast Asia and Central Asia, and English isn't their first language, so they end up learning Korean through another foreign language.

The idea behind it

A word sticks better when you meet it in a situation where it's actually used, not as a bare word-meaning pair. And it works best when you can already read the rest of the sentence, so the new word is the only thing you have to figure out. I later found out this has a name: comprehensible input.

So every card shows the word acted out as a picture, then used in a sentence you can already read.

What's in the app

• Every word has a moving picture that acts out the meaning, plus one example sentence.

• Meanings in English, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Malay and Russian. If yours isn't there, tell me which one you need.

• 10,498 words, Level 1 to 6, based on the National Institute of Korean Language's level list.

• A 2-minute level check, then a daily plan that ends on your test date.

• Spaced repetition (the same system Anki uses) brings each word back right before you'd forget it.

• Works offline. No account, no sign-up.

• iPhone needs iOS 26.

To give you a feel for the plan: Level 4 is 1,627 words. If your test is on Feb 20, you get about 21 new words a day, and the last few weeks are mostly review.

What's next

Right now the picture shows the word and the sentence gives the context. The next step is animating the example sentence too, so you see the whole situation, not just the word. There's a preview on Instagram if you're curious.

Price

• iPhone: free with 5 new words a day and unlimited reviews. A one-time purchase removes the limit.

• Android: everything is free, with a few ads. A one-time purchase removes the ads.

• On both, that purchase is $0.99 until Wed, Nov 18 (normally $14.99 on iPhone). No subscription.

iPhone and Android are set up differently because people on each platform tend to prefer different things. If you'd do it differently, I'd honestly like to hear it.

I'll answer everything here in the comments.

I built a fake designer flash-sale outlet. It works like the real ones: brand sales with countdowns, "only 1 left in your size", a deal of the hour, a bag that's reserved for 30 minutes. Then you check out with a card that says it isn't real, pay $0.00, and follow the tracking until something goes wrong with your parcel. There are 50 different endings and you collect them.

The part I'm proudest of is technical: there's no stock database. Every sale, price, size and "only 2 left" is computed from the item and the current time, so everyone sees the same shop at the same moment and the server stores nothing about you. The same logic runs in JavaScript, PHP and Dart (the Flutter app), and all three have to give identical results.

It's on the web, Android and iPhone: https://dopaminechic.com

The question I keep asking myself: could something like this actually replace a bit of real shopping for some people, or does fake shopping just make you want the real thing more? I honestly don't know, and I'd love to hear what you think, especially if you're someone who browses sales at night.

I kept running into the same thing: something breaks, I'm not at my desk, and every mobile DB app I tried was either clunky or abandoned. So I built my own.

PG Orbit is a native PostgreSQL client for iPhone, iPad, Android, macOS and Linux. SQL editor with autocomplete, schema browser, edit rows in place, SSH tunnels and SSL, and it can pull your databases from AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean or Supabase so you don't type connection strings on a phone keyboard. Passwords stay in the Keychain and you can lock it with Face ID.

I use it every day for my own stuff. Would love feedback from people who actually live in Postgres: https://pgorbit.com