Dictate

dictate

Voice-to-text anywhere on your Linux desktop. Press a key, speak, release, paste.

Uses faster-whisper for local, offline speech-to-text — no cloud transcription, no API keys. Whisper handles capitalization and punctuation automatically.

Demo

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/1721056f-6b26-47af-86c0-0f936ce5eb9f

Quick start

The installer first checks requirements and changes nothing if any are missing — it prints the exact commands to run (one dnf/apt-get line, plus adding you to the input group). Run them, log out and back in, and run bash install.sh again. The installer itself never uses sudo.

Two background services start on every login:
- dictate — daemon with Whisper model loaded in memory
- dictate-ptt — push-to-talk listener (system-wide keyboard detection)

The flow: press Right Ctrl in any window, speak, release the key. A bell rings when transcription is done. Press Ctrl+V to paste. Works in your terminal, browser, editor, Claude Code — anywhere.

No GPU required. On NVIDIA GPUs it uses the medium model for higher accuracy. On CPU (including Intel integrated) it uses the small model — still quite good for English. Works with your laptop mic, external mic, or AirPods.

Claude Code integration

The system-wide push-to-talk works directly with Claude Code — press Right Ctrl, speak your prompt, release, hear the bell, Ctrl+V into the Claude Code input. No special setup needed.

Optional: voice-enabled editor and /dictate command

Voice editor (Ctrl+G) — for longer prompts you want to review before sending:

Press Ctrl+G to open nvim with voice keybindings (F5 record, F6 stop/transcribe, F7 spell check). Dictate in chunks, edit, then :wq to send.

/dictate command — speak directly into the Claude Code prompt:

Type /dictate, speak, pause…