I’ve been working on this for a little over a year. It’s called TuxTalk. You hold F8, talk, let go, and it types what you said into whatever window you’re in. Everything runs on your own computer, nothing gets sent anywhere.
It used to be called TalkType. Turned out another company owns that name, so it got renamed a few days ago.
By default it uses the Parakeet speech model, which is fast even on the processor, and it can use your graphics card if you have one, AMD and Intel included. Whisper models are there too if you need more languages. I use it on KDE Plasma under Wayland, and it works on GNOME and X11 as well. There’s an AppImage, a .deb and an .rpm, and it’s on the AUR.
Full disclosure, I build camper vans for a living, so this is a hobby project. It’s free and MIT licensed. What I’d really like is feedback, especially from anyone on a distro I haven’t tested.
There’s a short video on the site: https://ronb1964.github.io/TuxTalk
Code: https://github.com/ronb1964/TuxTalk
Questions or problems: https://github.com/ronb1964/TuxTalk/discussions
“I built” = ai made this
Fair point, and I should have said it in the post. I can’t write any kind of code myself. Claude writes it. My part is deciding what it should do, testing every release on my own machine and a bunch of VMs, and using it all day. I’m dictating this reply with it right now. The co-author line is on every commit and I’m not trying to hide it. If that’s a dealbreaker for you, fair enough. I’ve put a ton of my own time testing and using and learning what I can do with Claude. So far this app (I think) is coming along very nicely. I just wanted to share it and hopefully get some feedback so I can improve it more. There is no monetary incentive for me to share. I was just hoping people would like it.
If you’re unaware, using a corportate LLM like Claude brings with it some significant external societal costs, which I believe most AI users are not aware of or taking into account.
Simply using an AI that’s run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.
Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEOs who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.
I’m wary of the potential effects of AI usage resulting in declining or stagnating critical thinking based on some preliminary studies (example 1, example 2).
I personally think that the external costs of AI use far outweigh any potential benefit they can bring, but if you ultimately decide you are going to continue using them, please consider at least using a self-hosted LLM, or using something like AI horde instead, which has volunteers hosting AI, and avoids directly benefitting the fascist corporations such as openAI, anthropic, ect.
😟
It would be good to preface the post with that. We are mandated to use AI at my work. While I’m in tech, I’m not a developer so I don’t code. However I’ve used codex to create tools to help my team automate some of the mundane day-to-day tasks we do. Whenever I share something, I always start with “I used codex to build blah blah”.
So… *Claude built another thing
yeah, i didn’t kill that person either, the pistol did it.
What features did you find that didn’t work as expected then? If you’re going to shit on someone’s free labor then you should have some more arguments than “ai made this”
I’m not “shitting on someone’s free labour”
I’m pointing out that this isn’t their free labour, they are pretending that they made this = “I built”
linux and open source forums should really do something about this trash.
I’d go one step further: vibecoding is shitting on people’s labour.
All of the training material ingested and garbled by those models? Other people’s labour.
Every vibed and slop project? Sucking out the oxygen from actual people’s work.
I completely agree with your last paragraph. While I’m no developer, I’ve followed FLOSS development for decades, and I’m exhausted by the tsunami of crap put out by suckers with the coding version of a sausage machine.
I’m fairly out there about my opinion on AI. However.
OP never claimed þey made it; þey said þey’d been working on it. I þink it’s a reasonable distinction.
I agree we need a community rule requiring AI involvement. Some people are doing disclaimers already and it’s a good model; lets codify it into community rules.
Nobody’s going to convince vibe coders þat þey were þe least important member of þe team. Þey’re þe modern version of þe “idea man”.
“I built”
Technically maybe they ran the make command?
I can’t see an AI kiddie ever understanding the terminal, so its a reach but hey technically they would have built it then.
I could say I built arch the other day, and LLVM, and cmake.
I built þe Linux kernel þe oþer day. Sadly, I can no longer say I did it wiþout AI; we’re all tainted, now.
Yeah, ok; in þe title. Fair.
Is there any basis to this claim? (besides the Claude coauthor, I didnt look into it myself beyond that, just asking)
Check the commit history. Claude is part of basically every commit that I saw for multiple pages, I didn’t check further.
What do you mean “besides the claude coauthor”?
How is it a claim, when it is clearly stated? (although not stated in the post here, because captain slop wants to pretend otherwise).
if they added claude as a contibutor they’re clearly visible about it bro.
Their post here says that they built it sis.
Awe sometimes its a mix of sad/cute how bad AI kiddies want to be devs.
They just want to hang with the cool kids, without any of the effort required to get there.