Votyper: real-time voice typing for Linux

Press a hotkey, speak, and watch your words appear in any app.

Votyper is a real-time voice typing app for Linux. Press a hotkey, speak, and your words are typed live into whatever text field has focus: a browser, a code editor, a terminal, a chat window. It is speech-to-text dictation that works in every app.

• Real-time: words appear as you speak, and Votyper corrects them as it hears more.
• Works anywhere: types into any app, on both Wayland and X11.
• Private and offline: speech recognition runs on your computer with Moonshine. Your voice never leaves the machine, and no internet is needed after installation.
• Easy to see: a system tray icon blinks while Votyper is listening, and short sounds mark the start and the stop.
• Meeting mode: a live transcript of a conversation, shown in a window and saved to a text file, without typing anything into your apps.
• Your hotkey: Ctrl+Space by default, and you can change it from the tray icon.
• Starts at login, so it is always ready.
• Light on memory: after 20 idle minutes it frees the speech model (about 500 MB), and wakes it up again the next time you press the hotkey.
• Open source, and small enough to read: plain Python, no heavy frameworks.
• English only, for now.

Installation

Install with one command in GNU/Linux:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kumarasinghe/votyper/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Use it

1. The installer starts Votyper for you in the background, and it starts at every login. If it is not running, open Votyper from your app menu. (If the installer asks you to log out and back in for the input group, it starts at that login.)
2. Click into any text field and press Ctrl+Space. You hear a sound and the tray icon blinks. Speak, and your words are typed as you talk.
3. Press Ctrl+Space again to stop.

To change the hotkey, click the tray icon and press Change hotkey….

Meeting mode

Use Meeting mode to follow and keep a transcript of a call or a meeting.

1. Click the tray icon to open the Votyper window. The buttons are in one row at the top: Change hotkey…, Meeting mode, Open transcriptions and Quit votyper.
2. Press Meeting mode. You hear a sound and the tray icon blinks, the same as when you dictate. The button now says Stop meeting.
3. What the microphone hears appears in the text area under the buttons. The sentence you are saying now is shown as it forms. A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, and a blank line is added after it. A pause in the middle of a sentence does not start a new line.
4. Press Stop meeting to end it. The text stays in the window until you start the next meeting.

While a meeting runs:

• The dictation hotkey does nothing, and nothing is typed into your apps. If you were dictating when you pressed Meeting mode, dictation stops first.
• Each finished sentence is saved at once, so a crash loses at most the sentence being spoken. You can close the window and open it again from the tray icon; the transcript is still there.
• The text is saved in ~/.votyper/meetings/<UTC start time>.txt, for example ~/.votyper/meetings/20261028T143005Z.txt. Only you can read the file. There is one file per meeting: each sentence is followed by a blank line.
• Open transcriptions shows the transcripts folder in your file manager.

Uninstall

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kumarasinghe/votyper/main/scripts/install.sh | bash -s -- --uninstall

Troubleshooting

Read the log: ~/.local/state/votyper/votyper.log

Good to know: the hotkey is also seen by the app you are typing in, so choose keys that app ignores. Typing assumes a US keyboard layout and skips characters outside plain ASCII.

License

Votyper is open source under the MIT License. The Moonshine speech model is a separate project with its own license terms; see moonshine.ai.