OpenCode team ships Hex 3.0 stable: local voice dictation for Mac, Windows and Linux, built for talking to coding agents

Background and pain point

Coding agents keep getting more capable, so the bottleneck is shifting to how clearly people can describe what they want. Typing long specs and review notes is slow, and most dictation tools send audio to the cloud, which is awkward when you are naming internal APIs or customers. On Oct 31, Anomaly, the company behind open-source coding agent OpenCode, announced the stable release of its Hex dictation app from the @opencode account, arguing that voice is the best way to talk to any agent.

How it works

Hex is native Rust: hold a shortcut, speak, release, and the text is pasted wherever your cursor is. Transcription runs entirely on the device with a downloaded local model such as Parakeet or Whisper, and ordinary dictation needs neither OpenCode nor a cloud service. Version 3.0 adds a vocabulary list to fix names and terms, a hex CLI for History and meeting notes with an MCP entry point, and optional rewriting through a running OpenCode instance.

Benchmarks and measured results

No standardized accuracy benchmark has been published; the per-model accuracy shown in the picker is the vendor's own. The official figures that can be checked: local models now use about 160 MB of memory versus about 900 MB before, and since 2.3.0 a 2-minute dictation finishes about 0.1 s after release, versus 0.9 s on an RTX 5070 Ti and 2.8 s on a MacBook Air M4 before.

Developer takeaways

On macOS, install with brew install --cask anomalyco/tap/hex; Windows and Linux have install scripts plus .deb and .rpm packages at anoma.ly/hex. Note that 3.0 does not update itself from 2.3.1 and starts fresh, so settings, History and models must be set up again, and macOS needs Microphone and Accessibility permissions granted again. It is worth a try for developers who dictate long requests to Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode.