verba

Verba is a desktop application for language learning that centres on conversation with an AI coach. It is built to run locally: pointed at Ollama, the chat, reading, speech and dictation features work without an internet connection, and there is no account or server to sign up to. Users may also bring their own key for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter or a local LM Studio instance, and switch providers in Settings. A session is presented as a plan rather than a menu. One theme ties together the day's conversation, reading, role-play and the vocabulary due for review. The coach speaks first and keeps the exchange moving, with suggestions offered only when the learner stalls. Replies include inline corrections, AI-generated graded reading, and automatic vocabulary capture; words that cause difficulty become a spaced-repetition deck that feeds the next session. Speech works in both directions. The app bundles a voice and an optional transcriber that run in-process: Piper provides one voice per language at about 21 MB and roughly seven times real time; Kokoro offers 53 voices across six languages at 349 MB; Whisper base and small are available for dictation at 208 MB and 639 MB. Users with an existing OpenAI-compatible server (Kokoro-FastAPI, speaches, LocalAI, vLLM) or cloud keys such as ElevenLabs and Deepgram can use those instead. Verba follows a ladder of bundled, local server, cloud key, then OS voice, and reports which tier is speaking. All data lives in a local SQLite file, exportable to a single file or placeable in a synced folder such as iCloud Drive, Google Drive or Syncthing so another machine can pick up the same words and history. Eight language packs ship: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Turkish, Italian and Portuguese; adding a language is described as a folder plus one import line. Releases cover macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux, and are unsigned, so the README documents the usual Gatekeeper and SmartScreen workarounds and notes that building from source avoids them. It also states plainly that the bundled speech engine has so far only been run on macOS arm64. Verba is MIT licensed and built with Tauri, Node and Rust.