Stopping a recording is the step there is no taking back. It is what sends the
audio off, and a moment later the sentence you did not mean to dictate is in
the clipboard and pasted into whatever window you were typing in. The tray menu
was the only way out, and by the time it is open the recording has already
gone. Discarding needed to be as quick as starting, which means a key.
Ctrl+Alt+Space rather than Escape: the combination the recording started with,
one modifier along, so the two are one gesture with a modifier between them.
Escape is the obvious choice and the wrong one, because it belongs to whichever
window has focus, and while you are talking something else usually has it. It
works on a dictation and on a command for the agent alike, since the one you
want to take back is the one that is running.
That made four global shortcuts, and four is the number at which three copies
of the same forty lines stop being a coincidence. The command line already had
a table of them; hotkey.py now holds it, and the settings window reads it too,
so a shortcut is a row rather than a combination box, two buttons, a status
label and three methods written out again. The window no longer takes the
commands to run as arguments either, because ipc.command_for already knows them
from the verb. Adding the fourth key is what this buys: one line in the table
and one call per row.
Both places a key can live are told about it. The listener catching the press
and the KDE shortcut arriving behind it go through the same echo guard the
toggle already had, so the two are one discard rather than two, and the tray
calls the inner method as it already did for the toggle. Ctrl+Space and
Ctrl+Alt+Space land on the same evdev key code, so there is a test for the
modifier matching that keeps them apart.
install.sh takes the second key as a second argument and refuses to register
two of the same. It hands both to `dikte shortcut install` rather than writing
kglobalshortcutsrc itself, which is what makes it work on GNOME, and what
finally puts the chosen key in the settings as well: the built-in listener
reads it from there, so a key written to only one of the two places was a key
that half worked.
Left empty in the settings window the discard key stays empty, unlike the
dictation shortcut which falls back to Ctrl+Space: a recording can always be
thrown away from the tray menu, so there is nothing to guarantee here.
install_shortcut(), remove_shortcut(), shortcut_status() and desktop_name()
were added and nothing called them: the settings window and the command line
both still went straight to the KDE ones. On GNOME, pressing Install ran
kwriteconfig6, which is not there, and the three interface strings written for
this never appeared. README said the settings window installs a GNOME or KDE
shortcut, and it installed neither.
Both callers go through the chooser now, and the status line names whichever
desktop answered.
Dictation ends the same way every time: the words you said land in the window
you were in. But half of what you say to a machine is not text to place, it is
something to do, and the answer to "what is on my calendar today" is not that
sentence written out.
`claude -p` is that session run without a window: the same skills, the same
connected services, the same account. So a second shortcut records exactly as
the first one does and sends the transcript there instead, and what comes back
is pasted where the transcript would have been. Which is what puts "save that
to my calendar on Thursday at three" inside a text field that has nothing to do
with Claude.
Permissions are the part worth being deliberate about, because nothing here can
answer a prompt: a mode that would have asked denies instead. It runs in `auto`,
which decides for itself with the prompt-injection checks left on, and the other
two modes are one setting away. What Claude was not allowed to touch is reported
rather than swallowed, since a reply that reads perfectly normal is otherwise
the only sign that the job did not happen.
Commands close together stay in one conversation, so "and move that to Thursday"
knows what "that" is; half an hour of silence ends it, as does the tray. The
answer is written to be read where it lands: no headings, no lists, and a
sentence naming what was done when something was done.
Its output is read as it streams rather than waited out, so the corner names the
tool it is on. A calendar lookup took 29 s in testing, which a still indicator
would have made indistinguishable from a hang. The clock and the stop button are
watched from a thread of their own, because the stream blocks between lines and
a model that thinks for a minute sends none: they end the run by killing the
process, which closes the stream and unwinds everything else on its own.
Transcript cleanup is off on this path. Claude reads through "erm" and "hani"
without help, and skipping it saves an API call and a second or two in front of
a screen you are standing at.
Who said what is the hard part of a meeting transcript, and the usual answer
is to hand one mixed recording to a model and ask it to tell the voices apart.
That guess is wrong often enough to be worse than useless in minutes, where a
decision attributed to the wrong person is a decision nobody made.
So the question never reaches a model. ffmpeg records the microphone and the
default sink's monitor as one stereo stream, you on the left and everyone else
on the right, and one process reading both is what keeps them aligned over an
hour. Each channel is transcribed on its own and the two are interleaved on a
single timeline, so attribution is settled by the wire a voice arrived on.
What a microphone picks up from the speakers lands on both channels; our copy
is dropped when it overlaps theirs in time and says nearly the same thing.
The stream is written to disk as it arrives rather than held in memory, so
length costs nothing and a crash costs the tail instead of the whole meeting.
Every stage the run reaches is recorded in meetings.jsonl, so a failure while
summarising does not throw away the transcription of an hour of audio: the
retry reads the transcript back out of the document and picks up from there.
A run that dies keeps its recording whether or not audio is being kept.
The minutes model is configured on its own, under Settings, with its own
prompt, and it is told who was expected in the room so the names come out
spelled right. It is told outright that the transcript is a record of other
people talking, not instructions addressed to it.
The built-in listener now holds several bindings rather than one, and the KDE
side is parameterised by desktop id, so the meeting toggle gets a shortcut of
its own on the same footing as the dictation one.
The listener reads /dev/input and reacts the instant a key goes down. The
KDE shortcut answers the same press by launching a whole Python process,
which then talks over IPC, so its toggle lands a few hundred milliseconds
later. The 400 ms guard caught that echo only when the machine happened to
be quick, and otherwise the recording was started and stopped by one press:
"No speech detected".
Route the two apart. A toggle arriving from outside the process right
behind a listener trigger is that echo, and its lateness also proves the
KDE shortcut is live, which leaves the listener with nothing to do but
double every press. So retire it, remember that in the config, and say so
in the tray rather than changing behaviour silently.
The screenshots were downscaled to 430 px wide, which made the UI text
blurry. Restore them at native 1292 px as lossless WebP, which is also
half the size of the original PNGs (72 KB against 155 KB for the largest).
Rewrite every em dash in prose, comments, docstrings and interface strings
as ordinary punctuation.
Ctrl+Space starts and stops a recording. The audio goes to OpenAI for
transcription, a model on OpenRouter strips the fillers and restores
punctuation, and the result is copied and pasted into the focused window.
Only the Python standard library and PyQt6 — HTTP, multipart uploads and
WAV writing are all hand-rolled.
- pw-record captures raw 16 kHz mono PCM with a live level meter
- the corner indicator is drawn through XWayland, since a Wayland client
cannot position its own window
- silence is caught before it costs an API call, relative to each
recording's own noise floor, plus a filter for the stock phrases models
invent when handed silence
- audio and video files can be transcribed too, optionally with [mm:ss]
timestamps, chunked through ffmpeg for long inputs
- global shortcut installs as a KDE custom shortcut, with an evdev
listener as a fallback until the session is restarted
- Turkish and English interface, following the system locale by default
yusufipk