TuxTalk

Hold a key, talk, let go. Your words show up wherever your cursor is.
Free voice dictation for Linux. It runs offline, and it works on Wayland.
_{TuxTalk used to be called TalkType. Same app, new name.}

Website  •  Install  •  New in 0.20  •  What it does  •  All the features  •  How it's made  •  What's new

Want to hear it too? Here's the one-minute version, with sound (GitHub starts it muted, so click the speaker icon):

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ddedf92d-bbd2-4fc2-94e1-05461e633784

That works on GNOME, KDE, COSMIC, Sway, Hyprland and X11 with no setup, because TuxTalk's little hotkey helper reads the key straight from the keyboard instead of asking the desktop for it, so there's no shortcut to set up in your desktop's settings. It's the only part that reads the keyboard, so other programs you run can't read your typing.

It's free, it runs completely offline, and nothing you say ever leaves your computer.

Claude, Anthropic's AI, writes the code. I test it and use it every day, and I hold the code to a standard a human developer would respect. How it's made says more.

New in 0.20

A voice detector. TuxTalk used to go by loudness, so a dryer's thump, a fan or dishes in the kitchen counted as you talking. Now it has a small voice detector built in (Silero VAD, 1.3 MB, nothing to download), and hands-free and Type at pause both ask it. Hands-free next to a dryer stops by itself far more often now. In our tests with 125 people reading in seven kinds of noise, the times it never stopped went from 1,195 to 353, and what's left is other people talking in the background, which is a voice too. A soft voice is heard like a loud one, and a cough or a clatter after your last word gets typed as "Yeah." a lot less.

"Quote" as a word. "I want to quote him on that" used to come out with a quote mark in the middle. Now it's the word when the words around it say so, and "he said quote hello quote" still puts hello in quotes. "Begin quote" and "end quote" work too.

Esc right after you let go. It cancels the dictation now, and an automatic send with it, up until the text starts going in.

Logitech keyboards work with the hotkey helper. Somebody on CachyOS had F8 do nothing at all on an MX Keys, and the hotkey test said it was working. A Logitech receiver tells Linux its keyboards are mice too, and the helper skipped anything that looked like a mouse. The helper (now 1.13) reads them, and a keyboard it's only allowed to read too. The hotkey test only says Working once dictation can really hear the key, TuxTalk says so when the helper can't read your keyboard, and Report a Problem includes the helper's own log. It only asks you to update the helper where that may matter, like a computer with a Logitech keyboard or mouse.

Safer updates and graphics card. A .deb or .rpm update is checked again somewhere only root can write before it's installed, the graphics engine only answers TuxTalk, and the CUDA download is pinned to the version we tested. The .rpm installs on openSUSE now, too. The changelog has the rest.

What it does

It fixes it when you change your mind. Say "no wait", "scratch that" or "actually" and correct yourself, and a small AI model on your own computer drops the wrong part. Every fix gets checked, and if the AI changed anything else, your words are typed exactly as you said them. It's optional, and it's off until you turn it on.

Commands and addresses come out right. Say "comma", "new paragraph" or "question mark" and you get the punctuation. Say an email or a web address the way you'd say it out loud and it's written the way it should be.

	Set up for your computer First run looks at your graphics card and your language and picks a setup for you. On a graphics card, a sentence is typed out in about a fifth of a second. No graphics card is fine too: the default model is fast on an ordinary processor. Want something else? One button shows every choice, with what it costs you in download size and speed. Later on, Use Recommended in Preferences gets you back to it, and What works with what? shows which models run on which hardware.
Teach it your words Names, brands, the part numbers you use every day. Put them in Your Words, in the Words tab, and they come out spelled your way, with Parakeet or Whisper, even when the model hears them split up, like "tux talk". If one still comes out wrong, say "fix that word" or pick it out of a recent dictation with Fix a Word, type it the right way, and it's fixed from then on. Each fix is kept under its word. Snippets are your own shortcuts, like "my email" for your address.
	Everything from the tray Start and stop dictation, switch between Recommended, Lightest and Battery saver, or grab one of your last 20 dictations back if the text landed in the wrong window. Those are kept in memory only and gone when you log out.
See how much typing it saves you Your Stats shows the words you've dictated today, this week and all time, and how long it would've taken to type them. Only the numbers are kept, never what you said.
	Take your setup with you Save your settings, voice commands, Fix a Word words and stats to one file, and load it on a new computer or after a reinstall. TuxTalk also keeps your last 10 settings on its own, so if a change or an update goes wrong you can just go back.
Turn a recording into text Got a recording or a video? Pick Transcribe a File in the tray menu, choose the file or drop it on the window, and you get the text back. MP3, M4A, WAV, MP4, MKV and a bunch more work. It uses the same model you dictate with, so there's nothing new to download, and you can keep dictating while it runs. On my NVIDIA card with Parakeet, three and a half minutes of talking took about nine seconds. You can copy the text or save it as a text file, or as subtitles for the video. The subtitle timing can be a second or two off, which is fine for most things but I wouldn't use it for a film. Remove ums and repeats cleans it up if you want, and your last 10 are kept under Earlier Transcripts.
	Try what's coming next TuxTalk Labs is at the bottom of Preferences, Advanced. It's for features that work but aren't finished, like Type at pause, voice editing ("edit that, make it shorter") and an indicator that follows the window you're dictating into. They're off until you turn them on, and there's a link right there to tell me how they're working for you.

How it's made

I'm Ron, and I don't write code. TuxTalk is written by Claude, Anthropic's AI, and every commit says so. My part is deciding what it should do, testing it and living with it. I dictate almost everything I write with it.

I know what a lot of people think of AI-written apps, and plenty of the time they've earned it. Thing is, I don't want TuxTalk to be one of those. Keeping the code clean matters to me as much as the app working. That means nothing left lying around that isn't used, no two pieces of code doing the same job, comments that explain why something is there, and a written checklist every change has to meet before it goes in. The goal is that an experienced developer can open any file and think it's well put together, not just that it happens to work.

And it's not only my word. Over 3,700 automated tests run on every change. Before a release it gets tested in virtual machines on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora Silverblue, Fedora KDE, Zorin, Pop!_OS, openSUSE Tumbleweed and Debian, plus Nobara, which I use it on every day. The hotkey helper had a security review from another developer, guelz, who went on to contribute a feature too. If you read the code and something looks off, open an issue. I'd rather hear it.

There's more about who's behind TuxTalk on the About page.

Installation

Arch Linux (AUR)

yay -S tuxtalk-appimage
# or
paru -S tuxtalk-appimage

Installed it and it works? A vote on the AUR page helps other Arch users find it — one click if you're logged in.

Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint (.deb)

Download tuxtalk_*_amd64.deb from Releases:

sudo apt install ./tuxtalk_*_amd64.deb

Fedora / RHEL / openSUSE (.rpm)

Download tuxtalk-*.x86_64.rpm from Releases:

sudo dnf install ./tuxtalk-*.x86_64.rpm

Both packages install to /opt/talktype (the folder kept its old name so upgrades from TalkType replace files in place), add a tuxtalk command and an Applications menu entry, and pull in the few system libraries they need.

AppImage (All Distros)

Download the latest AppImage from Releases:

chmod +x TuxTalk-v*.AppImage
./TuxTalk-v*.AppImage

The AppImage includes everything needed - just download and run!

Note: The AppImage doesn't need libfuse2 anymore. It does need fusermount, which nearly every desktop already has. If it won't start, install the fuse3 package:

• Fedora/RHEL: sudo dnf install fuse3
• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt install fuse3
• Arch/Manjaro: sudo pacman -S fuse3
• openSUSE: sudo zypper install fuse3

Flatpak

There's a sandboxed Flatpak build in packaging/flatpak, but it isn't published for download yet, and it hasn't been rebuilt since the rename to TuxTalk. Want a Flatpak version? 👉 Vote in the poll — enough interest and I'll make it happen.

System Requirements

Uninstalling

Open Preferences, go to Updates & Backup and click Uninstall TuxTalk… at the bottom. It removes TuxTalk and everything it set up on your computer: the program itself, the hotkey helper and the typing permission, the speech models and everything else it downloaded (CUDA libraries included), start at login, the menu entry and the GNOME extension. It asks for your password once. Your settings and word list stay unless you tick the box to delete them too, so installing again picks up where you left off.

If TuxTalk won't open, the same thing runs from a terminal:

tuxtalk --uninstall                          # .deb, .rpm and AUR
~/AppImages/TuxTalk.AppImage --uninstall     # AppImage

Removing only the package (sudo apt remove tuxtalk, sudo dnf remove tuxtalk, sudo pacman -R tuxtalk-appimage) takes the hotkey helper with it from 0.17 on, but leaves your settings and the downloads in your home folder.

sudo systemctl disable --now tuxtalk-hotkeys.service
sudo rm -f /etc/systemd/system/tuxtalk-hotkeys.service /etc/udev/rules.d/70-tuxtalk-uinput.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/99-talktype-uinput.rules
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/libexec/tuxtalk
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

rm -f ~/AppImages/TuxTalk.AppImage ~/AppImages/TalkType.AppImage
rm -f ~/.config/autostart/tuxtalk.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/tuxtalk.desktop
rm -f ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/*/apps/tuxtalk.png
rm -rf ~/.local/share/TuxTalk ~/.config/tuxtalk
rm -rf ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--Systran--faster-whisper-* ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--istupakov--parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-onnx ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--ggml-org--parakeet-GGUF ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--ggerganov--whisper.cpp ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--Qwen--Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct-GGUF
gnome-extensions uninstall [email protected]

systemctl --user disable --now ydotoold.service
rm -f ~/.config/systemd/user/ydotoold.service
sudo gpasswd -d $USER input

Quick Start

1. Launch TuxTalk - Run the AppImage or use your app launcher
2. First-run setup - TuxTalk will guide you through initial configuration
3. Start dictating - Press F8 (hold to record) or F9 (tap to toggle) — both always active
4. Speak naturally - Text appears where your cursor is
5. Use voice commands - Say "comma", "period", "new line", etc.

Hotkeys (Both Always Active)

No easy F-keys on your keyboard? Preferences → General also lets you pick Right Ctrl, Right Alt or Scroll Lock. Right Ctrl and Right Alt then stop working as Ctrl and Alt.

Want your own shortcut, or a script? Run tuxtalk --toggle (or --start, --stop). For the AppImage, use the AppImage file, by its full path, e.g. /home/you/AppImages/TuxTalk.AppImage --toggle (GNOME runs a shortcut without a shell, so ~ doesn't work there; Help shows yours). It starts TuxTalk if it isn't running and waits for the speech model to load, so the toggle is never lost.

All the features

• Two hotkeys, both always on. Hold F8 to talk, or tap F9 to start and tap again to stop. Pick any keys you like.
• Hands-free if you want it. Double-tap F9, talk, and it stops by itself when you go quiet. A single tap still works as a plain on/off switch, so a long dictation with thinking pauses never gets cut off. Say nothing for 10 seconds and it stops without typing anything.
• Your choice of speech model. NVIDIA's Parakeet is the default: fast on any processor, for English and 24 European languages. OpenAI's Whisper covers 99 languages, from Tiny up to Large-v3. Not sure which? What works with what? in Preferences lays it out.
• Only these languages. Tick the languages you actually speak and Whisper's auto-detect sticks to those.
• Any graphics card. NVIDIA, AMD or Intel through Vulkan, a 22 MB download. On NVIDIA you can use CUDA instead. TuxTalk times your graphics chip against your processor first and only uses it if it's really faster.
• Corrections. Say "no wait", "scratch that", "I mean" or "actually" and the optional AI fixes it. A separate setting with no AI drops "um", "uh" and stutters.
• Voice commands. "comma", "period", "new paragraph", "undo last word", "delete last three sentences" and more. See the full list below.
• Email and web addresses. "john at gmail dot com" types [email protected], and "github dot com" types github.com.
• Numbers as digits, if you want them. 25 instead of twenty-five, and 7:30 and 15th too. Works in English and seven other languages.
• Plain text in terminals. No capital at the start and no period at the end when you dictate a command.
• Voice editing (Labs). Select text, hold Shift+F8 and say how to change it. Tone and rewrites go to the AI, while caps, lists, commas and removing a word are done exactly in code. Bold, italics and underline work in LibreOffice and other word processors.
• Select and move by voice (Labs). Say "select the last sentence" or "go to the end" on its own and TuxTalk does it instead of typing it.
• Snippets. Make a phrase type anything you want, like "my email" for your address.
• Your Words. The names and terms you use, spelled your way.
• Fix a Word. Teach it a name or term it keeps getting wrong. Or just say "fix that word" right after a dictation.
• Paste Last Dictation. Ctrl+Alt+P types your last dictation again, for when it landed in the wrong window.
• Transcribe a File. Turns a recording or a video into text or subtitles with the same model you dictate with, and keeps your last 10.
• Pauses your music and videos while you talk, and starts back up only what it paused.
• Recent Dictations. Your last 20, one click to copy. Kept in memory only.
• Your Stats. Words dictated and typing time saved, at your own typing speed.
• Settings backup. Save everything to one file and load it on another computer. TuxTalk also keeps your last 10 settings on its own, so you can roll back a change.
• A recording indicator you can style. Orb, waveform, frequency bars or radial, any color, anywhere on screen. It reacts to your voice so you know it's listening. In Labs it can follow the window you're dictating into.
• Swiss German spelling. Types ss instead of ß, on by itself when your system is set to Swiss German.
• Tells you why when it can't type. If a dictation can't be typed into the window, TuxTalk says why and what fixes it.
• Private. Everything runs on your computer, and what you dictate is never written to a log unless you turn that on for troubleshooting.
• GNOME extension. A native panel menu on GNOME, and a tray icon everywhere else.
• Updates the right way. Through your package manager for the .deb and .rpm, in place for the AppImage, or through your AUR helper on Arch.

More

model = "parakeet-v3"     # AI model: parakeet-v3, tiny, base, small, medium, large-v3
device = "cpu"            # "cpu", "vulkan" (any GPU) or "cuda" (NVIDIA)
hotkey = "F8"             # Hold-to-talk key (hold to record, release to stop)
toggle_hotkey = "F9"      # Tap-to-toggle key (press once start, press again stop)
# Both hotkeys are always active simultaneously
language_mode = "auto"    # "auto", or "manual" to use the language below
language = ""             # language code for manual mode, e.g. "de"
beeps = true              # Audio feedback sounds
smart_quotes = true       # Use curly quotes " "
auto_space = true         # Auto-space between utterances
auto_period = true        # Add period at end of sentences

sudo systemctl disable --now tuxtalk-hotkeys

sudo rm -r /etc/systemd/system/tuxtalk-hotkeys.service /etc/udev/rules.d/70-tuxtalk-uinput.rules /usr/local/libexec/tuxtalk

# Prerequisites (Fedora/Nobara; other distros have the same packages under similar names)
sudo dnf install -y portaudio-devel wl-clipboard \
                    python3-gobject libayatana-appindicator-gtk3 libnotify

# Clone and install
git clone https://github.com/ronb1964/TuxTalk.git
cd TuxTalk
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install poetry
.venv/bin/poetry install

# Run
./run-dev.sh

xvfb-run -a dbus-run-session --config-file=tests/dbus-session.conf -- env \
    PYTHONPATH=./src:/usr/lib64/python3.14/site-packages:/usr/lib/python3.14/site-packages \
    .venv/bin/python -m pytest tests -q -p no:cacheprovider

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

TuxTalk's downloads also include other open-source software, like wl-clipboard, each under its own license. THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md lists them.

Download • Changelog • Report a bug • Ideas and questions