Getting Started with Nova

Nova is a voice dictation assistant running locally on your computer: it listens attentively, transcribes accurately, and lets you edit and format text without intermediary servers.

Quick Installation

Download the installer for your operating system from the Download page, then follow these instructions:

• Windows: Run Nova-0.1.0-Setup.exe and follow the setup wizard.
• Ubuntu / Debian: Run sudo dpkg -i nova_0.1.0_amd64.deb in your terminal or open via App Center.
• Fedora / Red Hat: Run sudo dnf install -y ./nova-0.1.0-1.x86_64.rpm.
• AppImage: Make executable with chmod +x Nova-0.1.0-x86_64.AppImage and run immediately.

Connect Providers (BYOK)

Nova uses a direct Bring Your Own Key architecture. Open Settings from the system tray icon to connect your preferred speech AI:

• Groq (Recommended for lightning speed): Sub-second speech recognition via Whisper-large-v3. Obtain a free key at console.groq.com.
• OpenAI: Whisper and GPT-4o models for transcription and rewriting.
• Google Gemini: Gemini 2.0 Flash and 1.5 Pro for audio reasoning and professional polishing.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Dictate seamlessly without leaving your editor or browser:

• Ctrl + Shift + Space or Super + Shift + V: Start or stop global recording.
• Escape: Cancel recording immediately without transcribing.
• Ctrl + C: Copy latest transcript to clipboard.

Three Writing Modes

Nova provides three integrated formatting modes:

1. Raw Text: Exact, authentic transcription of your words.
2. Polish: Punctuation cleanup, paragraph formatting, and grammatical consistency.
3. Prompt: Converts natural speech into structured prompt instructions ready for AI tools.