Wayland edition
Hold a key, speak, let go. Your words are typed wherever your cursor is. Recognition runs on your own CPU — no cloud, no account, no audio sent anywhere.
Free & open source · GPL-3.0 · No telemetry, ever
One key, three moments, about a third of a second of thinking.
Press and hold Ctrl+Alt+Space — or any combination you choose — in any app: email, editor, browser, terminal.
Say the thing. The tray icon shows a live waveform while it listens, and a turning arc while it thinks.
Your words appear where the cursor is, filler words trimmed and your own spellings applied.
Speech recognition runs on your CPU using NVIDIA's open Parakeet model. After the one-time model download, the app pins itself offline — unplug the internet and Twalkin will not notice. It makes exactly two kinds of network request in its whole life: fetching the model once, and checking for updates when you ask it to.
Press the correction key, type what it misheard and the right spelling once. Never see that mistake again. Your dictionary exports and imports as a file.
English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. Every visible string lives in one editable file — add a column, get a language.
A single AppImage. Mark it executable and run it. It updates itself from Settings, only when you press the button.
Dictation needs two things a Wayland compositor guards closely: noticing a hotkey while you work in another app, and typing into that app. Twalkin asks through the standard desktop portals, so the compositor stays in charge and you approve it once — no ydotool, no joining the input group, no udev rules. Two habits from X11 do change, and it is better to know now than to think something is broken.
Something like Ctrl+Alt+Space. A compositor will not bind a lone key such as Right Ctrl, so Twalkin defaults to a combination and tells you if the one you pick cannot be registered.
On X11 you highlight a word and press the correction key. Wayland does not let a background app read your selection — deliberately — so the popup asks you to type the misheard word instead.
Twalkin runs on Wayland sessions. It does not support X11 — there, use Talkin.
To see which session you are in:
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPEwayland — Twalkin is the right build.x11 — use Talkin instead.Your desktop must provide the GlobalShortcuts and RemoteDesktop portals: GNOME 45+ or KDE Plasma 5.27+. If they are missing, Twalkin says so at startup rather than quietly ignoring your hotkey. You will also need PipeWire or PulseAudio for the microphone, and a 64-bit (x86_64) machine.
Mark the file executable (right-click → Properties → “Allow executing” on most desktops), then open it. On first run it downloads the speech model once, about 600 MB, and works fully offline afterwards. Your desktop will ask once for permission to type into other windows — that is the portal doing its job.
Every release, with notes and checksums, is on GitHub.