Aria hears you, writes what you say, and reads text aloud. It's a voice assistant for macOS and Linux, with all speech processing on your machine. It also talks to your AI agents and keeps the conversation going. They get your words, never your audio.
What it does
- Dictate into any app on macOS, or to the clipboard on macOS and Linux.
- Ask your AI agent by voice, and keep the conversation going.
- Speak text aloud.
- Wake on a word you choose, with your own model.
- Listen to system audio on macOS and transcribe it, labeled by speaker.
- Learn your project's vocabulary, to help spell its names right.
Get started
A source build runs as target/release/aria in the examples above.
just app builds the macOS menu bar app with the daemon inside, into
clients/build/mac/Build/Products/Release/. It needs Xcode and XcodeGen.
Engines
- Speech recognition: Whisper, Parakeet, Moonshine, Nemotron, Parakeet MLX
- Speech synthesis: Kokoro, Qwen3-TTS, system voice
- Wake word: openWakeWord, livekit-wakeword
Toolkit
You can use these Rust crates in your own projects, without the Aria daemon.
aria-kit: audio capture, and the traits every engine implementsaria-stt: speech-recognition enginesaria-tts: speech-synthesis enginesaria-wake: wake-word detectionaria-speaker: speaker embeddingsaria-segmentation: speaker segmentationaria-web: the dictation pipeline in the browser, through WebAssemblyaria-primitives: process, file, and socket building blocks
License
- The daemon, CLI, macOS app, and the rest of this repository: AGPL-3.0-only.
- The Aria name and logo: reserved.
- The toolkit crates, the bench crates, and the protocol in
proto/: Apache-2.0. - Copied third-party material: THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.