Ubuntu's new Myna text-to-speech accessibility tool. Integration with Plasma?

I saw this new project by Canonical to bring voice dictation to Ubuntu/Gnome on Phoronix: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Myna-Speech-To-Text

Repository: GitHub - canonical/myna: Myna is a lightweight speech-to-text application for Ubuntu Desktop. · GitHub

On Ubuntu Discourse they said:
Under the hood, Myna uses speech recognition models running locally on your machine. The initial release targets Ubuntu Desktop on Wayland, with GNOME as the primary validated environment, while keeping the architecture open enough to support additional desktop environments in the future.

Dictation can be useful in some situations even for people with no disabilities, but for people that need it it’s something the Linux desktop really doesn’t have many alternatives for, especially on Wayland. If this tool is open and can be implemented in Plasma, it would be a great win for accessibility. I also think it’s the kind of thing governments would want if Plasma were to be adopted by them, due to laws about accessibility, etc.

If it works on GNOME I’m guessing it doesn’t need support from every app individually, right? Food for thought.

Seems like KDE has its own alternative: Dictee 1.3.2 — Offline voice dictation for Plasma 6 (Wayland-native, with plasmoid)

1 Like

That’s awesome. That should definitely be upstreamed and be fully integrated into Plasma if possible.

@rcspam do you have plans to upstream your work on Dictee to Plasma? It would be a game changer for accessibility. Maybe this could be discussed with Plasma devs on an issue at https://invent.kde.org/ or at the Matrix room for KDE Development.

Thank you for your enthusiasm @Guilherme_Franca.
@Samuele , thanks to share my work.
Dictée is just a ‘personal need’ project I share.
I help myself with Claude because not enough time to work full time on it. So don’t think development team agree with that to integrate it into Plasma :grinning_face: :ok_hand: and I fully understand that.
The actual version is 1.3.5 . A bug-fix version 1.3.6 arrive soon.
The future version 1.4 will focus on meetings, will add some ASR models (kyutai, nemotron…) , hotword boosting and VAD. So a lot of work yet.
Add star on my Github if the project is cool for you

1 Like