Prose

Speak freely. Get prose.

System-wide AI dictation for Windows — hold a hotkey, speak, and cleaned-up text is typed into whatever app is focused.

Pipeline: hotkey → mic capture → Groq Whisper transcription → AI cleanup (fillers removed, punctuation fixed) → pasted into the active window.

Spoken: “um, so like, I was thinking we should uh send them the report tomorrow, you know, before the meeting.”
Pasted: “So I was thinking we should send them the report tomorrow, before the meeting.”

An independent personal project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from the code of Wispr Flow, whose product inspired the idea.

Download

Option 1 — winget (pending submission)

winget install DanielRadicheski.Prose

Option 2 — direct download

Download the .zip from the latest release, extract it, and run Prose.exe inside the folder. No installer, no Python needed. On first launch it asks for a free Groq API key — that's the only setup.

(It's a folder, not a single .exe, on purpose: a one-file build unpacks itself into a temp folder on every launch, which antivirus can interrupt mid-unpack and stop it from starting. The folder build has nothing to race.)

⚠️ Windows will warn you. That's expected.

You'll see "Windows protected your PC". Click More info → Run anyway.

This happens because Prose isn't code-signed — a signing certificate costs a few hundred dollars a year and Prose is free. It is not evidence the app is safe or unsafe, only that I haven't paid Microsoft's toll.

Don't take my word for it — verify it instead.

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Is Prose safe? Read this bit.

I'd rather you be suspicious, so let me be blunt about what Prose does. To work at all, it must:

It does this	Which honestly looks like
Hook your keyboard globally, to catch the hotkey	a keylogger
Record your microphone	an audio bug
Read and write your clipboard, to paste text	credential theft
Upload your audio to a server	exfiltration

That is genuinely the behaviour profile of spyware. You should not trust a random unsigned .exe that does those things — from me or anyone else. So here's how to check rather than trust:

What it actually does, in the code

Every one of those capabilities is a few lines you can read yourself:

• Keyboard hook — main.py (_start_hotkey_listener). It only ever checks whether your hotkey is held. Keystrokes are never stored, logged, or transmitted.
• Microphone — audio.py. The mic stream opens only while the hotkey is held, and closes the moment you release it. Nothing is recorded when you're not dictating.
• Clipboard — inject.py. It saves your clipboard, pastes the transcript, and puts your clipboard back.
• Network — transcribe.py and cleanup.py. These are the only two files that make any network request. There is no telemetry, no analytics, no update check, and no server of mine anywhere.

What leaves your machine

Data	Where it goes	Why
The audio you dictate	Groq (data policy — not retained by default)	Speech-to-text
The resulting transcript	Groq	Cleaning up "um"s and punctuation
Nothing else. Ever.	—	—

Your API key is stored only in %APPDATA%\Prose\.env on your own PC. It's never sent anywhere except to Groq to authenticate you. Prose has no backend — I cannot see your dictation, and I couldn't collect it if I wanted to.

Verify your download

Releases are built by GitHub Actions from the public source in this repo — no binary is ever uploaded from my machine. You can check the exe you downloaded is exactly what this code produces:

# 1. Cryptographic proof it was built by CI from this repo's source
gh attestation verify Prose-1.0.3-win64.zip --repo danielRadiceski/prose

# 2. Or compare the checksum against the .sha256 file in the release
Get-FileHash Prose-1.0.3-win64.zip -Algorithm SHA256

Or skip the binary entirely and run from source — it's about six short Python files.

Why does my antivirus complain?

It might, and it's a false positive. Prose is packaged with PyInstaller, which bundles a Python interpreter — a pattern real malware droppers also use, so heuristic scanners sometimes flag it. This is a long-standing, well-known problem that affects nearly every PyInstaller app. (The download is built in folder mode rather than a single self-extracting exe, specifically to avoid the worst of this.)

Combined with the keyboard hook and mic access, Prose ticks a lot of heuristic boxes.

Here is the current VirusTotal report for the released binary — including any engines that flag it:

📊 VirusTotal scan for v1.0.3

To reproduce it: extract the release zip and run Get-FileHash Prose\Prose.exe — the hash matches the report above.

I'd rather show you the detections than have you find them yourself. If you're still not comfortable, don't add an antivirus exclusion — run it from source instead, where there's no binary to trust at all.

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Run from source

The safest way to use Prose: nothing to trust but the code in front of you.

1. Python 3.11+ (tested on 3.14, Windows 11).

2. Install dependencies:

   py -m pip install -r requirements.txt
   

3. API key: copy .env.example to .env and add GROQ_API_KEY — free at console.groq.com. That one key covers both transcription and cleanup.

4. Run:

   py main.py
   

   A microphone icon appears in the system tray.

Usage

• Hold Ctrl+Win and speak; release to finish. Text appears in the focused app a second or two later.
• A floating pill near the bottom of the screen shows a live waveform while you speak, then pulsing dots while transcribing. It never steals focus. Disable with OVERLAY_ENABLED=false.
• Right-click the tray icon to pause Prose, toggle AI Cleanup (off = raw transcript, lower latency), or quit.
• Tray icon color: 🔵 ready · 🔴 listening · 🟠 processing · ⚪ disabled.

Toggle mode instead

In .env, set HOTKEY_MODE=toggle — then Ctrl+Alt+Space starts dictating and pressing it again stops.

Changing the hotkey

HOLD_KEY accepts a single key (f9) or a combo (ctrl+win). Avoid bare alt — releasing Alt activates the menu bar in many apps, which swallows the paste.

Building it yourself

py -m pip install pyinstaller
py build.py

Produces dist/Prose/ (the app folder) and dist/Prose-<version>-win64.zip (the download), plus a .sha256. It's a folder build (--onedir), not a single exe — it extracts once rather than on every launch, which sidesteps the antivirus race that can otherwise stop a one-file build from starting. All runtime output goes to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Prose\prose.log.

Note: No Electron required — the overlay is drawn with Python's built-in tkinter. Electron/Tauri would only be worth it for a full HTML settings UI.

Install and run at startup

py build.py      # produces dist/Prose/
py install.py    # copies it somewhere stable + starts it with Windows

install.py copies the whole app folder to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Prose\ (so rebuilding dist/ can't break the startup entry), carries your API key over to %APPDATA%\Prose\.env, and registers Prose under the per-user HKCU\...\Run key. No admin rights, nothing outside your user profile.

To undo:

py install.py --uninstall

Toggling startup: tray menu → Start with Windows. It's also listed in Settings → Apps → Startup and Task Manager → Startup apps, so you can disable it the normal Windows way.

Other options: py install.py --no-startup (install only), py startup.py status|enable|disable (startup entry only).

Sharing Prose with someone else

API keys are never compiled into the app — it reads them from disk at runtime. So the app folder on its own is safe to hand over.

On a machine with no key, Prose shows a setup dialog asking for the recipient's own free Groq key (with a link to get one), then saves it to %APPDATA%\Prose\.env — per-user, no admin rights needed.

• ✅ Send: the .zip from the release. It sets itself up.
• ❌ Never send: your .env, or any folder containing it. .env is hidden in Windows Explorer, so it rides along silently in a zip. Whoever has it spends your Groq and Anthropic credits, with no per-user limit.

build.py never copies your real .env into the app folder, and warns you if one is sitting there.

Where keys are read from

First match wins:

1. .env beside Prose.exe — portable install
2. .env in the project folder — development
3. %APPDATA%\Prose\.env — written by the setup dialog

Tray → Open settings folder opens (3) so keys can be changed or deleted.

There is no safe way to embed keys in a desktop app for someone else to use — anyone can unpack a PyInstaller build and read what's inside. If you ever want others to use Prose on your account, the keys must live on a server you control, behind auth and rate limits.

If a key ever leaks, revoke it: Groq console · Anthropic console

Choosing the cleanup model

Transcription always runs on Groq Whisper. The cleanup step is pluggable via CLEANUP_PROVIDER:

Provider	Latency*	Extra key?	Notes
groq (default)	~270 ms	No — reuses GROQ_API_KEY	llama-3.3-70b-versatile. Groq does not retain inference data by default.
anthropic	~1100 ms	ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	Claude Haiku. Best punctuation; keeps more of your phrasing.
gemini	untested	GEMINI_API_KEY	⚠️ On Google's free tier, prompts and responses may be used to improve Google products, with human review in some cases. Your dictation is often personal — prefer the paid tier, or another provider.

* Measured on this project's dictation samples; see CLEANUP_PROVIDER in .env.example.

Faithful by design: cleanup only removes fillers/stutters and fixes punctuation — it keeps your exact words and won't swap them for synonyms. If the model ever rewrites or paraphrases instead of tidying, a guardrail detects the divergence and pastes your raw transcript instead. Cleanup failures never lose your words either — same fallback.

Configuration

All optional settings (hotkey, models, cleanup default) are documented in .env.example.

Icons

Two artworks live in icon.py, because one image can't do both jobs:

	Used for	Why
Logo (assets/prose_logo.png)	.ico sizes 48–256	The cursive wordmark is illegible below ~48px
Mic glyph (drawn in code)	Tray icon, .ico sizes 16–32	Stays crisp at 16px, and tints per state

build.py bakes both into a single multi-resolution prose.ico, so Windows picks the right artwork for each context. The tray glyph is recolored live: 🔵 ready · 🔴 listening · 🟠 processing · ⚪ disabled.

Preview the glyph states with py icon.py.

Testing individual pieces

Each module runs standalone:

py audio.py        # records 3s -> test.wav
py transcribe.py   # transcribes test.wav via Groq
py cleanup.py      # cleans a sample filler-laden sentence via Claude
py inject.py       # pastes a test string into whatever you focus

Known limitations (MVP)

• Text is injected via clipboard paste (Ctrl+V); your previous text clipboard is restored afterward, but non-text clipboard contents (images, files) are not preserved.
• In toggle mode, the hotkey's Space keypress may also reach the focused app in some cases.
• Apps that block simulated input (elevated/admin windows, some games) won't receive the paste — run the app as admin if you need dictation there.
• Bluetooth headsets (e.g. Pixel Buds) take ~0.5–1s to start delivering audio after recording begins, so the first word can get clipped — pause briefly after pressing the hotkey, or use a wired/built-in mic.
• Cloud transcription: audio is sent to Groq; cleaned text to Anthropic. No audio is stored locally.