Install

Source install (any distro with cargo)

git clone https://codeberg.org/NewtTheWolf/horchd
cd horchd

# Drop the universal preprocessing models from openWakeWord
oww=$(python -c 'import openwakeword, pathlib; print(pathlib.Path(openwakeword.__file__).parent / "resources/models")')
cp "$oww"/{melspectrogram,embedding_model}.onnx shared-models/

./packaging/install.sh

install.sh builds release binaries, installs them to /usr/local/bin/, copies the shared models to /usr/local/share/horchd/, scaffolds ~/.config/horchd/config.toml and the user data directory ~/.local/share/horchd/models/, then enables and starts the systemd user unit.

Verify:

systemctl --user status horchd
horchctl status

ONNX Runtime: bundled vs dynamic

horchd ships with two cargo features that control how the ONNX Runtime shared library is resolved:

Feature	Default	Binary footprint	Setup
bundled-onnxruntime	yes	~29 MB statically	Nothing — ort downloads + bundles the matching ONNX Runtime.
dynamic-onnxruntime		~5 MB binary alone	You install ONNX Runtime separately and LD_LIBRARY_PATH it in.

Pick bundled for a self-contained binary you can scp anywhere, and dynamic if your distro already ships ONNX Runtime (Arch's onnxruntime package, Debian's libonnxruntime, etc.) and you'd rather trim the daemon down.

# bundled (default — single self-contained binary)
cargo install --git https://codeberg.org/NewtTheWolf/horchd horchd

# dynamic (smaller binary, requires onnxruntime on the system)
cargo install --git https://codeberg.org/NewtTheWolf/horchd horchd \
  --no-default-features --features dynamic-onnxruntime

Arch / CachyOS (AUR)

A PKGBUILD ships under packaging/arch/. Once published to the AUR:

yay -S horchd                   # or paru / makepkg

The AUR package depends on pipewire. After install, fetch the shared models the same way as the source path (the package leaves them up to the user to keep the build hermetic):

sudo install -Dm644 "$oww/melspectrogram.onnx"  /usr/share/horchd/melspectrogram.onnx
sudo install -Dm644 "$oww/embedding_model.onnx" /usr/share/horchd/embedding_model.onnx

Then enable the unit and reload the config:

systemctl --user enable --now horchd
horchctl reload

Build dependencies

If you build from source you need:

• rustc 1.85+ (Rust 2024 edition)
• cargo
• A working PipeWire (or PulseAudio) install — cpal handles both
• libc, glibc — already on every Linux desktop

ort will download a matching ONNX Runtime binary on first build (with the download-binaries feature, which is on by default for the bundled variant).