Last Updated on April 1, 2026
In Operation
First, choose a language by clicking the Languages menu. We can search for a language from the search bar. Let’s choose English.
We can then download models for Speech to Text, Text to Speech and translation from English to a foreign language. The models are stored at ~/.var/app/net.mkiol.SpeechNote/cache/net.mkiol/dsnote/speech-models/. You’ll need plenty of disk space. For example, the Large model for Whisper takes up over 1GB of hard disk space.
From a user experience perspective, the interface isn’t particularly refined here although the drop down box letting you select between Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Translator is helpful. But there’s definitely room for improvement. There’s also an Other category for downloading punctuation.
Here’s an image of Speech Note in its translator mode.
I don’t speak any Portuguese whatsoever so I cannot comment on the accuracy of the translation generated by Coqui CV VITS.
Here’s an example of Text to Speech, generated using Piper.
The generated audio is saved in uncompressed WAV format to ~/.var/app/net.mkiol.SpeechNote/cache/net.mkiol/dsnote although this is not clear from the interface. The developer plans to add options to save to MP3 and OGG in the future.
Summary
Speech Note works well offering an attractive frontend to powerful Speech to Text and Tech to Speech models. As no net connection is required (other than to download the models), your privacy is not compromised.
All the heavy lifting is performed by other open source software, so our evaluation mostly focuses on the interface itself. We already give the highest plaudits to Whisper and Piper gets a strong recommendation.
We’d love to see support for other tasks such as spell checking and grammar checking in future releases.
Website: github.com/mkiol/dsnote
Support:
Developer: mkiol
License: Mozilla Public License 2.0
For other useful open source apps that use machine learning/deep learning, we’ve compiled this roundup.
Speech Note is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Related Software
| Speech Tools | |
|---|---|
| Piper | Fast, local neural text to speech system |
| Tortoise | Multi-voice text-to-speech system trained with an emphasis on quality |
| Coqui TTS | Offers pretrained models in more than 1,100 different languages |
| Bark | Transformer-based text-to-audio model. |
| Dia | 1.6B parameter text to speech model |
| Festival | General multi-lingual speech synthesis system |
| PraatSpeechAnalyser | Software for speech analysis and synthesis |
| Speech Note | Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Machine Translation |
| Mimic 3 | Lightweight Text to Speech engine |
| OrcaScreenReader | Scriptable screen reader |
| MeloTTS | High-quality multi-lingual text-to-speech library |
| Parler-TTS | Lightweight text-to-speech (TTS) model |
| Flite | Small, fast run time text to speech synthesis engine |
| RHVoice | Gives the visually impaired a synthesis voice with their screen reader |
| eSpeak NG | Continuation of the eSpeak project |
| eSpeak | Speech synthesizer using a formant synthesis method |
| Orpheus-TTS-FastAPI | High-performance self-hosted text-to-speech server |
| Gespeaker | GTK-based frontend for eSpeak |
| VoiceGen | Simple text-to-speech application |
| Glate | Google Translator and Text To Speech Service |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |