Hey KDE community! I’m excited to share Telly Spelly with you all, a little tool me and CursorAI coded “together” that makes transcribing speech ridiculously simple. It lives in your system tray, uses OpenAI’s Whisper for transcription, and works completely offline.
Why I Made This
As someone who often thinks out loud, I wanted a frictionless way to get my spoken words into text. No cloud services, no complicated interfaces — just hit a key, speak, hit another key, and find my words on the clipboard. Telly Spelly is the result of scratching my own itch.
What Makes It Special
- One-Click Recording: Start/stop right from your system tray
- Global Shortcuts: Press Ctrl+Alt+R to start and Ctrl+Alt+S to stop recording from anywhere
- Visual Feedback: Live volume meter shows you’re being heard
- Multiple Languages: Not just English, it supports many languages out of the box [I’m Portuguese BTW]
- Native KDE Look: Follows your system theme seamlessly
- Microphone Selection: Choose your preferred input device
- Model Options: Balance speed vs. accuracy based on your needs
Integration with KDE
Being a KDE enthusiast, I made sure Telly Spelly feels right at home on Plasma. It uses standard system icons, respects your theme preferences, and integrates with KDE’s notification system. The settings persist across sessions, just as you’d expect from any well-behaved KDE application.
Looking Forward
I have several ideas for future development:
Get feedback and improve based on community needs
Integrate with text boxes and KDE applications
Add text formatting options
Improve styling options
Add LLM integration for text quality improvement
Cheesy toasts for breakfast
Try It Yourself
- Please give it a spin and let me know what you think
- Feel free to suggest improvements or report bugs
- Installation instructions are in the README
- Thanks for checking out my project!
It’s a labor of love, and I hope you find it as useful as I have in my daily workflow. Happy transcribing!
https://github.com/gbasilveira/telly-spelly
https://medium.com/@gbasilveira/telly-spelly-my-voice-to-text-tool-for-kde-plasma-65fcbc913577
