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

  • Mio@feddit.nu
    1·
    9 hours ago

    Thank you! Request for improvement: show the text as I speak.

    Edit: I notice on Fedora KDE Wayland that the Dictation Service just stops after a while of starting it. I need to manually start it again when I want to use it.

    • ronb1964@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      8 hours ago

      In the preferences, in the advanced, if you scroll down, you’ll see power management and then that’s where it times out after inactivity. That’s there if you’re on a laptop it tries to save the battery. If you untick that it’ll just stay on. That’s the way I use it.

      As far as showing the text as you speak, I tried that before and there’s a slight delay and I found that you’re trying to read it as you’re speaking and it just messes up your cadence because you’re still speaking as you’re reading what you just said. I’ll look into that again if people seem to really want that, but in practice I found it very distracting. Is there something else that you use where that works properly and you find it to be valuable?

      • Mio@feddit.nu
        1·
        5 hours ago
        • I am on wired workstation computer - it does not have a battery
        • Turning off power management in that tool help. Nice, now I can use it for real 😁 Maybe have menu “Dictation Service” -> Power Management On/Off would have helped me or something.
        • When power management on and it were inactive, then when I pressed the hotkey button to talk or use the CLI --toggle, then I would expect it to actually start the service and show the splash counter and listen. Currently the user have to go to the menu and start the service manually if it has been idle. CLI show: “TuxTalk is loading its speech model. Recording starts as soon as it’s ready.” but I don’t know when I can start to speak as I never see anything.

        As far as showing the text as you speak, I tried that before and there’s a slight delay and I found that you’re trying to read it as you’re speaking and it just messes up your cadence because you’re still speaking as you’re reading what you just said. I’ll look into that again if people seem to really want that, but in practice I found it very distracting. Is there something else that you use where that works properly and you find it to be valuable?

        • Showing the text to me is just about knowing when to stop talking as it failed to recognized the correct language. I use the parakeet model that can’t limit language. However, I don’t know if I really need that feature, I will test more.

        • This is better than Handy for me as it does not cut the first letter in the output text and it does not consume 1 GB of RAM.

        • In snippets I have an idea to ‘You say’ and have an action to just run a command line program. Then I could have You say ‘Open firefox in incognito mode’ to run the command ‘firefox -private-window’. But maybe that is better suited for other applications that have AI and try to be assistents.