Dictee 1.3.4 released — Plasma 6 voice dictation

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Hey everyone,

While working on the upcoming v1.4 — which should bring quite a few new things, including VAD mode (continuous listening, no need to hold a key), faster transcription on CPU-only machines and on smaller GPUs, and better accuracy on long recordings — I came across a few bugs in v1.3 that needed fixing now rather than later.

So here is dictee 1.3.4, a maintenance release. What it changes for you:

  • When you work on several transcriptions at once in the Transcribe window, each tab now behaves on its own — the audio player, the timeline, the rename field and the formatting choice stay attached to the tab you opened them in, even if you click around.
  • Speaker separation no longer gets confused between transcriptions, and the formatting (with or without speaker labels) follows what you actually transcribed.
  • The push-to-talk shortcut (F9 by default) no longer stays stuck after a crash or a forced reboot.
  • Long audio files are now handled automatically: dictee splits them in pieces sized to your hardware, so you no longer need to worry about running out of memory on a smaller GPU.

Get it: Release v1.3.4 · rcspam/dictee · GitHub

You’ll find packages for Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch (AUR/PKGBUILD), a universal tarball, and the standalone .plasmoid widget. If you’d rather not pick, the one-liner installer does it all:

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

For those who don’t know dictee yet: it’s a fully-local voice dictation app for Linux, with native Plasma 6 integration (systray and widget). You can dictate in 25 languages, transcribe meeting recordings with speaker labels, and optionally pass everything through a local LLM to clean up grammar — all offline, nothing leaves your machine.

Don’t hesitate to share your experience — feedback, suggestions, anything weird on your setup. v1.4 will benefit from it.

Cheers,
rcspam

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Why is it called Dictee, why not replace the C with a K?

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Not all KDE related products actually use the ‘K’

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I just discovered that the output quality deprends on the volume of your microphone.

When you still see volumepeaks in the setup due to backgroundnoise, the endresult is poor (except in english)

Lowering the volume so no violumepeaks are visible results in an perfect result.

Impressive!

One small note.

The trayicon is a little bit to small and to dark in order to match the other trayicons:

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@JohanW

Microphone volume adjustment is important, you are right here, that’s why I put a mic volume slider with meter in the plasmoid.
Are you using both, plasmoid and tray-icon?
Tray-icon is mainly designed for those who do not have KDE/Plasma, for example Gnome, etc.
I think I’m reshaping the icons in the future.

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I mainly used the tray icon, but the plasmoid dragged as an icon in the menubar is a better solution. The plasmoid in the menubar works great, but is a bit wide.

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In the begin it’s a bit confusing as a new user. Having 2 interfaces for the same tool.

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ok, so the reason for the plasmoid icon being so wide is for the “live microphone animation preview”

Is there a way to disable the tray icon? now I have both the trayicon and the plasmoid icon in the bottom bar.

The pin/unpin popup option doesn’t work.

edit : I disabled the trayicon to “never show up”

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You must open the configuration window to the visual feedback page