# Hex 3.0 takes free, offline voice dictation beyond the Mac — and cuts its memory use to about 160 MB

> Anomaly's open-source Hex lets you hold a key, talk, and have text pasted into any app without sending audio to the cloud. Version 3.0 brings one app to Mac, Windows and Linux, and it was one of GitHub's fastest-climbing repos on November 2.

Published Nov 2, 2026 by TechMeasured Staff · Repos · Canonical: https://techmeasured.com/repos/hex-3-local-voice-dictation-windows-linux

**Hex**, an open-source voice dictation app from Anomaly, shipped version 3.0 on October 31, and the repo is climbing GitHub's charts: a daily trending tracker logged **1,179 new stars** for the repo on November 2, the fourth-biggest gain on that day's list.

The pitch is simple and useful: hold a shortcut, speak, let go, and Hex transcribes on your own machine and pastes the text into whatever app you're in. The project's README says that after the first run downloads a speech model, "nothing leaves your machine." For anyone who dictates notes, messages or prompts to coding agents all day, that's a free, private alternative to cloud dictation services.

## What's new in 3.0

Hex started as a Mac app. The 3.0 release notes describe a broader, slimmer product:

- **One app on three platforms.** The same settings window now runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, with a single updater offering Stable and Dev channels on every OS.
- **Much lighter.** Local models now use about **160 MB of memory instead of roughly 900 MB**, according to the release notes.
- **New models.** Additions include "Underdog Bark 3.0" Pro and Clean variants plus a Bangla model, and the model picker now shows each model's accuracy. The Moonshine model was removed.
- **Vocabulary.** You can list names and jargon to steer transcription — handy for product names and colleagues' surnames.
- **Smarter triggers.** Shortcuts can use both Option keys, a specific left or right modifier, or a mouse button, and Hex now skips recordings with no speech.
- **New extras.** A `hex` command-line tool and a beta Meetings feature (macOS, under Labs) arrive; Annotate, a screen-recording-with-voice feature, is in the Dev channel on macOS and Linux.
- **Cuts.** Voice Action and spoken commands are gone.

Linux gets ARM64 builds, `.deb` and `.rpm` packages and a tray icon. The repo page lists Windows (10 and 11, x64 and ARM64) and Linux (targeting i3/X11 and wlroots-based Wayland compositors) as beta, with Apple-silicon Macs on macOS 15 or newer as the main platform.

## Under the hood

The repo page says Hex is built in Rust and supports Parakeet and Whisper speech engines alongside the newer models. It also offers per-app "modes," custom text transformations written in TypeScript or JavaScript, an optional OpenCode integration for post-processing, a transcript history, and a TypeScript SDK (`@kitlangton/hex`) for adding local transcription to other apps.

One unusual policy: the team doesn't accept outside pull requests. Bug reports and ideas go in Issues instead. The code is MIT-licensed, so forks are fair game.

## How to try it

```bash
# macOS (Apple silicon)
brew install --cask anomalyco/tap/hex

# Arch Linux
yay -S hex-bin

# Nix
nix profile install github:anomalyco/hex
```

Windows installers, a Linux install script and `.deb`/`.rpm` packages are linked from the README. Two upgrade gotchas from the release notes: upgrading starts fresh, so the first launch re-downloads a speech model, and on Windows 3.0 installs as a new app — you'll need to uninstall 2.3.1 yourself.

## Who should care

If you've been paying for cloud dictation, or avoiding it because you don't want your voice on someone else's servers, Hex is worth ten minutes. Linux and Windows users should treat it as beta. And because transcription runs locally, accuracy and speed will depend on your hardware and the model you pick — the new accuracy labels in the picker are the place to start.


## Sources

1. [GitHub — anomalyco/hex](https://github.com/anomalyco/hex)
2. [GitHub — anomalyco/hex release v3.0.0](https://github.com/anomalyco/hex/releases/tag/v3.0.0)
3. [GitHub — Trending 2026-11-02 (caige6666/github-trending-daily)](https://github.com/caige6666/github-trending-daily/issues/25)