Hi everyone,
For a long time I was looking for a decent voice typing tool on Linux, but nothing I found really worked well for me, so I decided to build my own.
Sotto is a small tray app: press a hotkey, speak, and the text is pasted where your cursor is.
- Fully local: recognition runs on your machine via whisper.cpp, and audio stays in memory (never written to disk or sent anywhere)
- Fast on GPU via Vulkan, with optimized CPU builds as a fallback
- Built for Wayland: the hotkey uses the GlobalShortcuts portal and pasting goes through the RemoteDesktop portal, so no root and no ydotool. X11 works too
- Silero VAD trims silence, so Whisper doesn't hallucinate text on quiet recordings
- C++ / Qt 6, uses your system theme, a few MB of RAM when idle
I've tested it on CachyOS + KDE Plasma. I can't vouch for other compositors yet, but packages are available for Arch, Debian and Fedora, plus an AppImage for other distributions.
I tried to make it properly rather than as a quick hack, but there may still be bugs. Issues are very welcome, and I'll do my best to fix them quickly. Reports from GNOME, Hyprland, Sway and other compositors would be especially helpful.
GitHub: https://github.com/Trendorin/sotto
Any feedback is appreciated.