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.
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.
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?