# Blurt

Tray-based push-to-talk voice-to-text for Linux and Windows. Toggle recording
with a hotkey, speak, toggle off — Blurt transcribes the clip and copies the
text to your clipboard.

If a transcript starts with `to my agent`, the rest is dispatched as an agent
task instead of copied.

## Setup

Requires [uv](https://docs.astral.sh/uv/) and Python 3.11+.

```sh
uv sync
```

### API key

Blurt reads the key for its current model's provider in this order:
environment variable → OS keyring → local file.

| Provider   | Env var              | Keyring (`service` / `user`)    | File                 |
|------------|----------------------|---------------------------------|----------------------|
| OpenAI     | `OPENAI_API_KEY`     | `openai-api-key` / `felixm`     | `api_key.txt`        |
| OpenRouter | `OPENROUTER_API_KEY` | `openrouter-api-key` / `felixm` | `openrouter_key.txt` |

Key files and runtime config stay local (gitignored).

## Running

**Linux** — `uv run blurt` starts the tray icon. Bind a hotkey to
`./blurt-toggle`, which signals the running instance to start/stop recording.

**Windows** — launch `blurt.vbs` (runs Blurt with no console window). The
global hotkey is **F20**.

## Configuration

Set from the tray menu, or via files / env vars:

- **Model** — `model.txt` / `BLURT_TRANSCRIPTION_MODEL`. For lowest latency use
  `openai/whisper-large-v3-turbo` (OpenRouter, served by Groq).
- **Language** — `language.txt` / `BLURT_TRANSCRIPTION_LANGUAGE` (`en`, `de`).
- **Input device** — tray menu (persisted by name in `device.txt` /
  `BLURT_INPUT_DEVICE`). Pick an explicit mic: PortAudio device indices shift
  when USB gear comes and goes, and the OS default source can change under you.
  The menu hides playback endpoints and raw ALSA `hw:` devices that the sound
  server already owns; `BLURT_INPUT_DEVICE` can still name one directly.
  Devices that refuse 16 kHz (raw ALSA and PipeWire's JACK endpoints do) are
  captured at their native rate and resampled.

Every clip is conditioned before upload — the first 150 ms are dropped (mics
click when the stream opens), DC bias is filtered out, and the level is
normalised towards -20 dBFS. Near-silent clips are refused instead of being
sent, since transcription models answer silence with confident hallucinations.

## Checking the microphone

`uv run mic_check.py [device] [seconds]` records from Blurt's configured input,
prints levels before and after conditioning, saves the WAV it would have
uploaded, and transcribes it with the current model. Use it when transcripts
come back wrong: bad audio shows up as a DC bias, clipping, or a speech level
far below -30 dBFS.

Logs are written to `blurt.log` in your temp directory (openable from the tray
menu).

## Moving to another machine

`uv run export.py` writes a zip of just the source (no 200 MB+ `.venv`, no
caches, no key files) to your temp directory. It's pure Python, so it runs the
same on Linux and Windows — no shell needed — and it only reads, so it's safe
while Blurt is recording. Unzip on the other machine and `uv sync` to rebuild
`.venv` for that OS. (Or simply `git clone` the repo fresh.)