Command line

The Voltip program, voltip-desktop (voltip-desktop.exe on Windows), accepts options for two purposes: controlling the Voltip that is already running, and recognising audio files without opening a window.

Controlling the running app

These options are passed to the Voltip that is already running. Without a running Voltip, --quit exits at once and the others start the program normally.

Option	Effect
--toggle	Starts dictation, or stops it and inserts the text
--edit-toggle	Starts a voice edit of the selected text, or finishes it
--cancel	Cancels the current recording or result
--start-hidden	Starts without showing the main window, with the tray and the shortcut only
--quit	Quits the running Voltip, as Quit Voltip in the tray menu does

On Linux with Wayland, bind system shortcuts to --toggle, --edit-toggle and --cancel; see Shortcuts and recording modes.

Without a window

These options print their result and exit. They open no window, tray icon, shortcut or microphone, so they work in scripts and on servers.

Option	Output
--list-devices	The input devices, one per line: identifier, tab, name; the default one first
--list-models	The local models and whether each is installed
--list-compute	The processor threads, and each graphics card this build can use
--download-model <id>	Downloads a model, resuming an earlier attempt, and checks its hash. Progress goes to standard error
--transcribe-file <file.wav>	Recognises a WAV file with a local model and prints the text

--transcribe-file accepts these further options:

Option	Effect
--model <id>	The model to use. Default: the one selected in the app, or Qwen3-ASR 0.6B
--json	Prints { "text", "model", "latency_ms", "backend" } instead of the text alone
--device auto|cpu|gpu	Where the model runs. Default: the app's setting
--gpu <name>	Which graphics card, as listed by --list-compute
--threads <n>	How many processor threads to use

The file should be 16 kHz mono; other sample rates are converted. The model identifiers are qwen3-asr-0.6b, qwen3-asr-1.7b, sense-voice-small and paraformer-zh.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success
1	The model is not installed, or recognition failed; the reason is on standard error
2	The audio file could not be read

Example

voltip-desktop --download-model sense-voice-small
voltip-desktop --transcribe-file meeting-note.wav --model sense-voice-small --json

On Windows the program is built as a desktop app, so PowerShell does not show its output directly. Redirect it to a file instead: voltip-desktop.exe --transcribe-file a.wav --json > out.json.