u/ImLitteRabbit

I've been thinking about gift ideas that feel more personal than the usual flowers, mugs, or gift cards, and I found an interesting one: creating a custom song for someone.

The site is called DedicaMusic. Basically, you give some details about the person, the occasion, and the vibe you want, then it creates a personalized song you can offer as a gift.

What's nice is that you can listen to the song before buying it, so there's no real commitment if it's not what you had in mind.

I feel like this could be a fun idea for birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, apologies, or even private jokes between friends, couples, or family members.

Not sure if this is something everyone would like, but for the right person it could be a really memorable gift.

Would you find this cute/fun as a gift, or too unusual?

I really like VoiceInk on macOS, but I couldn't find a Windows alternative that felt quite right, so I built one and made it open source.

Parla is a push-to-talk dictation app for Windows.

Hold Right Alt, speak, then release. Parla transcribes your voice and pastes the text directly at your cursor, in any app. It can run fully offline, or use cloud providers if that fits your workflow better.

Local models included:

Whisper.cpp, from tiny to large-v3-turbo
NVIDIA Parakeet TDT via ONNX Runtime, including English and multilingual models
Silero VAD for voice activity detection
Embedded llama.cpp support for LLM post-processing with any GGUF model, such as Gemma, Qwen, or Llama
Ollama support if you already use it
Windows OCR support to include visible screen context in enhancement prompts

You can use LLM post-processing to clean filler words, fix casing and punctuation, rephrase text, extract action items, or apply your own custom prompt.

Cloud options are also available:

Transcription: Groq, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Mistral Voxtral, Soniox, Speechmatics, and Gemini
LLM enhancement: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Mistral, Groq, Cerebras, OpenRouter, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint

The app is built with Rust, Tauri v2, React, and TypeScript. The installer is around 45 MB, with no extra runtime required. The default build is CPU-only and works on Windows 10 and 11. CUDA support is available as an optional build flag for GPU acceleration.

Feedback, bug reports, feature requests, and GitHub stars are very welcome.

Would you give someone a custom song as a gift?

[OPEN SOURCE] Parla: Voice to text app for Windows (yet)