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
Thank you! Request for improvement: show the text as I speak.
How is this different than Handy besides not being multi platform? Also vibe coded, also uses Parakeet, also just for text input as a background service but with multiple ways to do it for compatibility, also has push to talk, it can do multiple language transcription even in the same sentence.
It is already pretty much the de-facto standard now for AI-based TTS apps and is very polished for a vibe coded app.
I love how every cuck-coded app doesn’t disclose it or mention it at all in the readme, to make the illusion that they built it themselves. 😂
“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.
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”
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.
hey, this looks great! i have some health issues on my tendons so anything that takes time away from typing helps me with the pain. i will definitely try this out!
Seems a lot like a 5 day old Speech Note. What makes it different?
Speech Note’s a good app and it does a lot more than mine, like notes, reading text out loud and translation. Typing into other windows is one of its features. As far as I can tell you start and stop that with a shortcut, and on Wayland you set up ydotool yourself.
TuxTalk only does the dictation. You hold F8 while you talk and it types when you let go. Setup takes care of the typing permissions and the hotkey for you. If Speech Note already works for you I don’t think there’s a reason to switch.
Tbh, with this review process, I kinda agree that the commits don’t get attributed to LLMs. It puts the slop blame squarely on the shoulders of the submitter
