Dictee 1.3.2 — Offline voice dictation for Plasma 6 (Wayland-native, with plasmoid)

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1

Hi everyone,

Let me introduce dictee : a voice-dictation tool with its own Plasma 6 plasmoid — but it does more than that. Your dictation is transcribed and translated live, right where your cursor is, of course ; and there’s also a full diarization backend for your meetings and video calls. 100 % local by default, Wayland-native, with several visual-feedback options to choose from.

dictee push-to-talk demo — press F9, speak, text appears at the cursor

What it does

  • Push-to-talk dictation with a customizable shortcut, for live transcription and translation right at the cursor.
  • 4 ASR backends switchable on the fly: Parakeet-TDT 0.6B v3 (25 langs, native punctuation, default), Canary-1B v2 (built-in translation, 48 pairs), faster-whisper (99 langs), Vosk (lightweight, strict offline).
  • Optional post-processing: regex/dictionary rules, language-aware capitalization, and LLM cleanup via local Ollama (lightweight model like gemma3:4b, 100 % offline).
  • File transcription window with timeline player, multi-tab, speaker diarization up to 4 speakers (NVIDIA Sortformer), per-tab translation, LLM analysis on diarized transcripts via your LLM service of choice — local (Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, Jan, or custom endpoint) or cloud (OpenRouter, Mistral, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Groq, Claude, Gemini, OpenAI…). Export to PDF / SRT / JSON / Markdown.

Plasma 6 plasmoid

Quick access to dictee and visual feedback right in the panel via the plasmoid.

dictee plasmoid widget on Plasma 6

File transcription with diarization

A dedicated window for offline transcription of audio/video files. The chunked diarization pipeline lets you work on long files.
dictee-transcribe — file transcription with speaker diarization, audio player, and per-tab translation

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rcspam/dictee/master/install.sh | bash

Or grab the package for your distro directly from the v1.3.2 release — Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/RHEL, Arch PKGBUILD (AUR-ready), and a generic tarball for other distros. You’ll also find a standalone .plasmoid if you only want the widget.

CUDA libs are bundled via a pip venv at postinst on .deb / .rpm — no NVIDIA repo to add. CPU-only packages exist for laptops without a discrete GPU. Since v1.3.2, the CUDA package no longer pulls the 1.5 GB of pip libs when no NVIDIA GPU is detected — automatic CPU fallback at runtime.

Repo & license

Looking for feedback

I’d particularly like to hear from Plasma 6 users on:

  1. Wayland edge cases — different compositors, multi-monitor focus, Activities.
  2. Plasmoid UX — is the cheatsheet popup useful, or noisy ?
  3. Anything that breaks on a fresh install — especially on distros I test less often (openSUSE, NixOS).
6 Likes
Ubuntu's new Myna text-to-speech accessibility tool. Integration with Plasma?
2

Hi everyone.

For those who would not know, animation-speech is fully configurable.

3

Impressive ! Very fast (no GPU / parakeet), well integrated and run out of the box (I had handy and vibe before)

1 Like
4

No matter what version I try to install (rpm) i get an error

“There was a problem while updating the installationprocess. Try again later”

“Executing transaction failed”

Fedora 44 kde

Lenovo tinkpad T490, 16 GB Ram

version 1.3.4-1, downloaded from Github

5

Thanks @padawan ,

Very happy to see it be useful for you.
Don’t hesitate to go to https://github.com/rcspam/dictee to report the bugs et speak new features. and add a star :wink:

Thank you again.

6

Thanks to try Dictee @JohanW ,

Sorry about that.
I just tested dictee-cpu-1.3.4 on a fresh Fedora 44 — it installs cleanly via
dnf. So the package itself looks fine. The “Executing transaction failed”
message from Discover is unfortunately a catch-all that hides the actual
error.
Could you try a CLI install (from terminal) so we get the reel cause?

sudo dnf install ./dictee-cpu-1.3.4-1.x86_64.rpm

(or replace with whichever rpm you downloaded — make sure the path is right)

Also useful: do you already have a previous version of dictee installed?
The CPU and CUDA packages are mutually exclusive, and Discover doesn’t make that obvious.
To check:

rpm -qa | grep dictee

If anything shows up:
sudo dnf remove dictee-cpu dictee-cuda dictee-plasmoid
first, then retry the install.

Paste the full dnf output here either way — we’ll pinpoint it from there.

You can also post an issue on github

7

thank you for your reply.

No previous version installed.

I get this error (in dutch)

Probleem: probleem met geïnstalleerd pakket

  • geïnstalleerd pakket ffmpeg-8.0.1-6.fc44.x86_64 conflicteert met ffmpeg-free, dat door ffmpeg-free-8.0.1-6.fc44.x86_64 van fedora aangeboden wordt
  • pakket ffmpeg-8.0.1-6.fc44.x86_64 van rpmfusion-free conflicteert met ffmpeg-free, dat door ffmpeg-free-8.0.1-6.fc44.x86_64 van fedora aangeboden wordt
  • pakket ffmpeg-8.0.2-1.fc44.x86_64 van rpmfusion-free-updates conflicteert met ffmpeg-free, dat door ffmpeg-free-8.0.1-6.fc44.x86_64 van fedora aangeboden wordt
  • pakket dictee-cpu-1.3.4-1.x86_64 van @commandlinecommandline vereist ffmpeg-free, maar geen van de aanbieders kan worden geïnstalleerd
  • tegenstrijdige verzoeken

So I have to remove current ffmpeg an install a install a different version of ffmpeg to get this working?

Not sure what other installed program will do

8

@JohanW
Thanks for sharing the logs.

I guess you have ffmpeg from RPMFusion installed (the full build with proprietary codecs), which is great for video playback but conflicts with the ffmpeg-free package we declare as a dependency. They’re mutually exclusive on Fedora by design — DNF can’t satisfy our requirement without uninstalling your ffmpeg.

That’s a packaging bug on our side (we should accept either one). I’ll fix it in the next release.

In the meantime, you can install dictee without touching your ffmpeg setup with a single command:

sudo rpm -ivh --nodeps /path/to/dictee-cpu-1.3.4-1.x86_64.rpm

The --nodeps flag only skips the dependency check for this install. All your other packages stay intact. Your ffmpeg from RPMFusion provides the binary dictee actually needs (/usr/bin/ffmpeg), so it’ll work fine at runtime.

To uninstall later if needed: sudo rpm -e dictee-cpu

Sorry for the trouble, and thanks for the detailed report — it’s actually how I noticed the bug.

Keep me informed if it solved the issue here.

9

Installatyion successfull.

Launching dictee configuration or dictee transcribe doesn’t do anything (except for the wobbling icon.

Next rebooted PC and logged in.

popup shows up and says dictee configuration is not set.

Pressed ok to setup, but nothing happens

Also launched dictee transcribe, but notting happens.

probably some ffmpeg dependency?

10

Sorry

Install deps too

sudo dnf install -y python3 python3-pip python3-evdev pulseaudio-utils\
 pipewire libnotify python3-pyqt6 sox  wl-clipboard xclip curl\
 translate-shell python3-numpy moby-engine polkit kf6-kconfig\
 wireplumber libayatana-appindicator-gtk3
11

@JohanW

Now fixed in Release v1.3.4 · rcspam/dictee · GitHub

No more conflicts between ffmpeg and ffmpeg-free versions

Thanks for your report

1 Like
12

Thank you.

I had some issues with my buildin microphone, but thats fixed.

So I get the dictee icon on the bottom right and I can click/control click, but I don’t see anything poping up.Where does it record everything? (cant fine any .wav or .mp3

I also added the plasmoid on the desktop and in responds to my voice.

I don’t see the interface (1st 3 images in your first post.

Here my desktop to give you an idea of what it looks like:

01
011920×1080 357 KB

13

You can ignore my previous post.

Seems to be working now!

I’ll do some testing next few days.

Thanks for the support!

14

The plasmoid should be put in a panel like this below. But freedom being precious, you do as you feel :wink:

demo-dictee-demi-1.3.2

Normally, when you launch Dictee setup, you have a wizard who helps you configure everything.

Cheers