TalkType

Your transcription ghost friend. Voice-to-text that doesn't suck.

✨ Features

Progressive Transcription

• ⚡ Instant Start: Web Speech API for 0ms latency (Chrome/Edge)
• 🔒 Privacy Mode: 100% offline transcription with Whisper
• 🤖 Auto Mode: Let TalkType choose the best option for you
• Smart Model Selection: Automatically picks optimal Distil-Whisper model based on your device

Delightful Experience

• 👻 Ghost Personality: Animated companion with 4 themes (peach, mint, bubblegum, rainbow)
• 📱 PWA Installable: Works offline, installs like a native app
• 🎨 Beautiful Design: Pastel-punk aesthetic with smooth animations
• 📋 Quick Copy: One-click copy to clipboard

Privacy & Performance

• 100% Private: All transcription happens locally (in Privacy mode)
• Distil-Whisper Models: 6x faster, 50% smaller than regular Whisper
• WebGPU Ready: Future-proofed for 10-100x speed improvements
• No Subscriptions: Free forever, no accounts, no data collection

Developing

Once you've created a project and installed dependencies with npm install (or pnpm install or yarn), start a development server:

npm run dev

# or start the server and open the app in a new browser tab
npm run dev -- --open

🔐 New: the first time you trigger any Gemini-powered feature, the browser will prompt you for the API_AUTH_TOKEN from .env. The token is only used to open an HttpOnly session cookie so random clients can’t drain your quota.

Set API_AUTH_TOKEN and API_COOKIE_SECRET (any 32+ char random string) in your .env, and tweak API_RATE_LIMIT, API_RATE_WINDOW_MS, or API_SESSION_TTL_MS if you need different defaults.

Deploying (Netlify)

We ship with @sveltejs/adapter-netlify and a netlify.toml that points Netlify at the correct build output. To deploy:

1. Install deps: npm install
2. Set environment variables in Netlify → Site settings → Environment:
   • VITE_GEMINI_API_KEY
   • API_AUTH_TOKEN
   • API_COOKIE_SECRET (32+ random chars)
   • Optional: API_RATE_LIMIT, API_RATE_WINDOW_MS, API_SESSION_TTL_MS, MAX_UPLOAD_BYTES, API_COOKIE_SECURE=true
3. Build command: npm run build
4. Publish directory: Netlify auto-detects .svelte-kit/output/client via the adapter (no manual override needed)

Hit “Deploy” and Netlify will generate the serverless functions + static assets automatically.

Building

To create a production version of your app:

npm run build

You can preview the production build with npm run preview.

Quality Assurance

We use Lighthouse CI to maintain high performance, accessibility, and best practices standards.

# Run Lighthouse CI tests
npm run lighthouse

This will:

1. Build the production version of the app
2. Run Lighthouse audits against key metrics
3. Generate reports in the lighthouse-reports directory

Thresholds

• Performance: 85+
• Accessibility: 90+
• Best Practices: 85+
• SEO: 90+

Failing these thresholds will cause warnings or errors in the CI process. We prioritize accessibility with stricter error thresholds.