Vocalinux is a voice dictation application that lets you enter text into virtually any Linux application by speaking into a microphone.
It supports both X11 and Wayland and performs speech recognition locally, so audio and transcribed text do not need to leave your machine.
The application supports whisper.cpp, OpenAI Whisper, and VOSK speech-recognition engines. whisper.cpp is used by default and offers Vulkan acceleration on AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA graphics hardware. A GTK-based settings interface provides access to recognition, audio, shortcut, and advanced options.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Enters dictated text into Linux applications.
- Supports X11 and Wayland sessions.
- Provides fully offline speech recognition.
- Offers whisper.cpp, OpenAI Whisper, and VOSK engines.
- Supports Vulkan acceleration with AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA graphics hardware.
- Includes toggle and push-to-talk activation modes.
- Offers configurable global keyboard shortcuts.
- Provides spoken commands for punctuation, line breaks, capitalisation, and deleting text.
- Uses neural voice activity detection when ONNX Runtime is available.
- Includes a system tray indicator and graphical settings interface.
- Supports automatic startup through XDG autostart.
- Offers command-line options and multiple recognition models.
Website: github.com/VocaHQ/vocalinux
Support:
Developer: Jatin K Malik
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Vocalinux is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Speech Recognition Tools | |
|---|---|
| Whisper | Automatic speech recognition (system trained on 680,000 hours of data |
| whisper.cpp | Run Whisper locally with fast, efficient C/C++ speech recognition |
| Flashlight | Fast, flexible machine learning library written entirely in C++. |
| sherpa-onnx | Offline speech recognition for many platforms and languages |
| Kaldi | C++ toolkit designed for speech recognition researchers. |
| FunASR | Versatile speech recognition toolkit for real-world audio |
| faster-whisper | Faster Whisper transcription with reduced memory use |
| SpeechBrain | All-in-one conversational AI toolkit based on PyTorch |
| Handy | Offline speech-to-text application |
| ESPnet | End-to-End speech processing toolkit |
| PocketSphinx | Lightweight speech recognition for embedded and mobile use |
| deepspeech.pytorch | Implementation of DeepSpeech2 using Baidu Warp-CTC. |
| Epicenter | Transcription application with global speech-to-text functionality |
| Julius | Two-pass large vocabulary continuous speech recognition engine |
| Speech Note | Write notes, transcribe speech, translate text and read content aloud |
| aTrain | Private local transcription of recorded speech through a polished GUI |
| hyprwhspr | Native speech-to-text designed for Arch / Omarchy |
| Vocalinux | Local voice dictation through a clean desktop interface |
| ostt | Open Speech-to-Text |
| Simon | Flexible speech recognition software |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our carefully curated directory of recommended free and open source software, covering every major software category.The directory forms part of our extensive collection of articles for Linux enthusiasts. It includes hundreds of detailed reviews, together with free and open source alternatives to proprietary software from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. LinuxLinks also covers interesting projects worth exploring, Linux-compatible hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful free and open source Linux application that we haven’t covered? Tell us about it using our submission form. |
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