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

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
    52·
    4 hours ago

    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.

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.