Hex Voice

On-device voice dictation for BB's chat composer and `bb voice transcribe`, powered by Hex and macOS 26's built-in Apple Speech (SpeechTranscriber + SpeechAnalyzer) or local GGUF speech models (Parakeet, Whisper, Qwen3-ASR, Cohere Transcribe, Nemotron). Starts a warm embedded `hex service --embedded` daemon when BB loads the plugin, adds a Voice Provider picker directly to the composer microphone right-click menu, transcodes browser microphone clips (`audio/webm`, `audio/mp4`, `audio/ogg`) to 16 kHz mono PCM WAV via `ffmpeg`, and stops the daemon automatically when BB exits.

Overview

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Hex Voice

On-device voice dictation for BB's chat composer and bb voice transcribe, powered by Hex and macOS 26's built-in Apple Speech (SpeechTranscriber + SpeechAnalyzer) or local GGUF speech models.

Why Hex Voice

BB's composer microphone button dispatches recorded speech to the active voice AI service. With Hex Voice installed and selected, pressing the microphone button transcribes your speech locally on Apple Silicon in ~100ms with zero cloud calls, zero API keys, and zero recurring cost.

How it works

Registers the hex (Hex (Apple Speech)) AI service via bb.experimental_aiServices.register.
Adds a Voice Provider picker to the microphone right-click menu — right-clicking the composer microphone button displays all configured voice providers right below Input device, so you can switch between Hex (Apple Speech), Codex, and any other configured voice provider on the fly.
Manages a warm hex service --embedded daemon tied to BB's plugin lifecycle (bb.onDispose and a stdin pipe lease), so it starts automatically when BB loads the plugin and exits cleanly when BB quits or reloads.
Transcodes browser microphone recordings (audio/webm, audio/mp4, audio/ogg, etc.) to 16 kHz mono 16-bit PCM WAV via ffmpeg before sending them to Hex's /transcriptions endpoint.
Supports Apple Speech and local GGUF models — defaults to apple_speech (macOS 26 SpeechTranscriber), with support for parakeet_unified_en, parakeet_v2, parakeet_v3, whisper_large_v3_turbo, qwen3_asr06_b, cohere_transcribe, and nemotron_3_5_asr.

Commands

Check service health and installed models:

bb hex status

Set Hex as BB's active voice service:

bb settings ai-services set voice hex

Transcribe an audio file from the CLI:

bb voice transcribe /path/to/audio.wav

Requirements

macOS 26+ on Apple Silicon for apple_speech (or macOS with a local GGUF model for Parakeet/Whisper).
hex (>=3.2.0) installed on PATH (for example /opt/homebrew/bin/hex or ~/.local/bin/hex) or configured via the plugin's hexBinaryPath setting.
ffmpeg installed (for example brew install ffmpeg) to transcode browser MediaRecorder clips (audio/webm / audio/mp4) to 16 kHz mono PCM WAV.

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