Pressing the shortcut while a transcript was being transcribed or cleaned up
did nothing, and the thought you had while waiting was lost. The microphone is
free the moment a recording stops, so the next dictation can now be spoken at
once; the pipeline queues it and each one is finished, pasted and reported in
the order it was spoken. The corner indicator stays with the recording under
way rather than being wiped by the previous run's progress, and a stop that
lands behind an unfinished run says it is waiting its turn.
A check on the releases page once a day: at start, on a timer while Dikte
runs, from the General tab on demand, and from `dikte update` at a terminal.
What it finds goes in the tray menu and in one notification per version, and
opens the release page.
Nothing is downloaded and nothing is installed. The four downloads are
installed four different ways and three of those belong to the platform: a
Mac bundle cannot rewrite itself while it is running, the Windows setup has
an uninstall entry of its own, an AppImage is a file kept wherever its owner
keeps it, and a checkout is updated with git. Being wrong about any one of
them means an installation somebody has to repair by hand.
Versions are compared by their numbers alone. A build off master carries the
released number with its commit after it, and that build is ahead of the
release it names rather than behind it; read as a version suffix, every
nightly would be told to go back to a release it had already passed.
The clock lives in its own file rather than in the settings, since a check
runs while the settings window may be open and a background write into
config.json is what would overwrite whatever it holds.
The releases page had nothing for Windows, so the only way in was a
checkout, a Python and a pip install. What goes out now is one setup
program per release: PyInstaller's directory, the pinned ffmpeg the
disk image already uses, and Inno Setup around both. It installs for
the account alone, so no administrator is asked for.
Two executables over the one program there, because a windowed one on
Windows has no standard output at all: Dikte.exe for the Start Menu and
dikte.exe for the terminal, sharing everything they carry. The icon is
drawn by Dikte itself into an .ico, the way the Mac's .icns and Linux's
PNGs already are, so there is still no image file in the repository.
Starting at sign-in is a registry value rather than a Startup shortcut,
which is what lets the setup program, the uninstaller and
`dikte integrate` all mean the same thing: the wizard asks once, and
typing the command changes the answer later.
The three builds move into build.yml, which release.yml now calls
instead of holding its own copy, and which a pull request touching the
packaging runs on its own. A broken build is then a red pull request
rather than a failed release.
Three files disagreed. The test workflow gained a job on either side, so
both stay: the Mac now parses the release and packaging scripts as well,
and Windows keeps its own job below.
`restart` and `launch_gui` both start Dikte again, and master moved that
argv into `ipc.launcher()` because a packaged build has no `__main__.py`
to name. Windows still cannot use execv there, so the detached start it
needs now takes what the launcher hands it rather than spelling the
interpreter and the script itself.
The test counts in CONTRIBUTING are the suite as it stands after the
merge: 1104 of 1147 run anywhere, and the 43 left are the Linux ones.
Installing meant cloning the repository and running a shell script, which
is a fair ask of somebody who already has a terminal open and no ask at
all of anybody else. The releases page now carries an AppImage and a disk
image per Mac architecture: a push to master rebuilds a rolling "latest",
a v* tag publishes a version and leaves it there, and the Run button in
the Actions tab raises the number by running scripts/release.sh, which is
the same script and not a second copy of what it does.
Two things in the application had to give for that. A build has no
__main__.py on disk, and an AppImage is mounted somewhere new every run,
so the command a shortcut is registered with cannot go on being this
interpreter and this file; ipc.launcher() answers with the AppImage or
the bundle instead. And a build carries its own libstdc++, which every
process it starts inherits through LD_LIBRARY_PATH and none of them can
live with: ffmpeg, ydotool and wl-copy are the distribution's binaries
built against the distribution's libraries, and AppImageLauncher, which
is what starting the AppImage again goes through, refuses outright.
integrate.py puts that variable back before anything else runs.
Nothing installs itself over an installation that is already there.
install.sh's menu entry, install-mac.sh's login item and the desktop file
AppImageLauncher writes are each recognised and left alone, so trying a
download once does not quietly move the machine onto it. `dikte
integrate` is how you ask for it outright, and --remove takes it back.
The disk image carries an ffmpeg, pinned and checksummed, because macOS
records through one and ships nothing like it. It is signed ad-hoc and
not with an Apple certificate, so a first launch is refused until Open
Anyway and the permissions are asked for again after each update; both
READMEs and the release notes say so.
Every file this branch touches moved into dikte/, so the merge is mostly the
rename following the edits. What needed a hand:
hotkey.py: master replaced the _macos()/_gnome() pair with one backend()
chooser, and this branch had added _windows() to the pair. Windows is a fifth
value of the chooser now, and everything that used to ask "macOS or Windows?"
asks backend() instead. The key is held by the running process there, so
installs_shortcuts() and shortcut_needs_restart() are both false for it, and
desktop_name() says Windows.
install.ps1 and the Windows README name dikte/__main__.py, the entry point the
Linux and macOS installers were pointed at in the same commit. The Start Menu
entry, the autostart entry and the dikte.cmd shim all come off one $entry
variable.
settings_ui.py: the shortcut tab now has a Windows sentence of its own, with
the Turkish for it. Falling through to the branch master wrote for a desktop
with no registry would have told a Windows user to check /dev/input. Nothing
covers that branch: there is no Windows Settings test class, the way there is
one for macOS.
CONTRIBUTING: the chooser it names is backend() now, and the test count is the
merged one, 1067 of 1110 running anywhere.
Twenty-two files at the top of the tree was the first thing anybody saw of
this repository. They are one package now, imported relatively, and the three
scripts that are not the front door moved under scripts/. install.sh stays
where the README has always said it is.
What starts the application is dikte/__main__.py: python3 -m dikte runs it,
and so does naming the file, which is what the launcher symlink, both .desktop
files, the macOS bundle and every registered shortcut do. Run by path there is
no package around it, so it puts the checkout on sys.path itself.
The installers now keep the keys you chose when they are given none, which is
what an update is: update.sh no longer has to read them out and pass them back.
An updater from before this commit cannot read them at all, so the one thing it
can say, the default key with an empty discard key, is read as "nothing was
asked for" rather than obeyed. That guard can go once nobody is updating across
this commit.
Only GNOME was recognised, and everything else was handed to KWin. On i3,
XFCE, Cinnamon, MATE, sway and the rest, Dikte wrote an entry into
kglobalshortcutsrc that nothing reads, called the session KDE, and
promised that the keys would work after the next login. They never did.
There is no backend to write for any of them. The /dev/input listener is
already desktop-agnostic, so those sessions are the case macOS has always
been: no registry, nothing to install, nothing to remove, and the
combination held by the running process. One backend() function decides
which of the four this session has, and the name shown, the status read
back, what Install writes, what Settings explains and what the installer
promises are all taken from it, so they cannot disagree.
A desktop now only counts when the program that writes its registry is
there too. A GNOME session without gsettings and a Plasma one without
kwriteconfig6 fall to the listener rather than to a file, which is also
how Plasma 5 stops erroring on a kwriteconfig6 it never had.
What Settings shows on those desktops is the truth: no Install button, no
KWin, no listener checkbox (it is the mechanism, not a choice), what
reading /dev/input costs, that the focused application sees the keys too,
and the command to bind if you would rather your desktop owned them. The
evdev listener records what it is listening for the way the Carbon one
does, so the status line has something to say there at all.
Closes#28
A phone call in the middle of a dictation left two choices: send what
was said so far off to be transcribed, or throw it away. Both end the
sentence you were in the middle of. Now the recording can be held: the
microphone stays ours, what was said before the pause stays in the
buffer, and what is said during it is dropped.
The capture program keeps running and keeps handing blocks over, which
are read and thrown away rather than left in the pipe. Stopping it
instead would mean asking the sound server for the device again on the
way back, and that is the one moment another application can take it: a
recording would be lost to the phone call it was paused for.
The clock stops with it. Paused time is time the recording does not
have, so the indicator and the length limit both go by what was
actually captured, and a five minute limit is not spent waiting.
The indicator says so as well, since a pulsing dot, moving bars and a
counting clock otherwise all say the words are still going in: the
ribbon freezes where the pause found it and turns amber behind two
bars. The tray menu holds and resumes it, `dikte pause` does, and so
does a global shortcut, which starts empty because holding a recording
is not something a keyboard has a habit for.
Dictation and a command to the agent both, whichever is recording. A
meeting is left out: it writes to a file as it goes and keeps two
streams aligned itself, and neither of those wants a hole in it.
README.tr.md still offered three, so a Turkish reader could not tell Windows was
supported at all. CONTRIBUTING opens the section a port is written from, and it
described three tables and three systems; there are four of each now, plus
paths.py, which master separated out while this branch was adding a Windows case
to the two copies it replaced.
The macOS backends were already here: CoreAudio capture through ffmpeg,
pbcopy and CoreGraphics, Carbon hotkeys, the paths under ~/Library. What
was missing was everything that installs them, so install.sh hands over to
install-mac.sh on Darwin rather than growing a branch per line: the XDG
directories, the .desktop files and the shortcut registry mean nothing
there, and an application is a bundle rather than a path. The bundle
carries a copy of the interpreter, because macOS files the microphone and
Accessibility permissions against the process that asks, and a launcher
running Homebrew's python3 would have asked as python3 and shared the
grant with everything else on that interpreter. It is signed ad-hoc so a
reinstall is the same application rather than two more dialogs, and it
says so plainly when a brew upgrade has moved the tree it needs.
uninstall.sh and update.sh follow it.
The tray icon was invisible: QIcon.fromTheme wants a freedesktop icon
theme and hands back a null icon without one, which in a menu bar is the
whole interface gone. trayicon.py draws the three shapes as template
images, so they follow the menu bar into dark mode, and the bundle's icon
comes off the same glyph rather than a binary in the repository. Linux
keeps its own icons; these are used only where the theme has nothing.
paths.py is the fix that was never about a Mac. config.py imports ggml.py,
so ggml.py could not ask it where the data goes; each worked it out for
itself and only one of them knew about macOS. Settings went to ~/Library
while several gigabytes of models went to ~/.local/share, which is not a
place a Mac user looks and not a place uninstall.sh --purge would have
deleted from.
Ctrl+Space is the input-source switch there and Cmd+Space is Spotlight, so
the default is Ctrl+Option+Space, and hotkey.default_combo is the one
place that difference lives. The first paste asks for Accessibility with
kAXTrustedCheckOptionPrompt, which is what creates the row to switch on;
asking the other way opens a pane Dikte is not listed in. `dikte shortcut
status` asks the running instance, since the combination is held by that
process and by nothing else.
Local speech to text is the one piece a Mac builds by hand. whisper.cpp
publishes no macOS binary and Homebrew's is configured with
WHISPER_BUILD_SERVER=OFF, so it installs whisper-cli and not the server
Dikte talks to; program_path already takes a whisper-server off the PATH
or out of Settings, so the answer is the one a Linux distribution gets,
and the README carries the cmake line. CI grows a macOS job on 3.11 and
3.13, the only place the Carbon and CoreGraphics libraries have to be
there to be opened.
Written and tested on macOS 27.0 arm64. Two things are still unverified on
a Mac: the paste end to end, which waits on the Accessibility toggle, and
a meeting recording, which needs a loopback driver.
The section ran longer than Ubuntu and macOS put together, and most of it
answered questions nobody asked while installing: why ffmpeg-free is enough
in detail, why the runtime directory settles after login, and why the local
models need nothing added. That last one says "do nothing", which is what
the reader would have done anyway. The reasoning stays in the pull request,
where it belongs; the README keeps the package line and the drop-in.
install.sh printed the drop-in the README already carries, six lines where
every other warning there is two. It now points at the README.
Its readiness check also went from asking whether the unit was up to asking
whether the socket is writable, which reads a stopped daemon as ready: the
socket file outlives the process. It now wants both, with pgrep for the
process so a ydotoold started by hand still counts. All five paths were
exercised with systemctl and pgrep shims, and on this Arch box the real
user service still reports ready.
The first line still named KDE and Wayland only, and Install stopped at
Ubuntu. A Mac has nothing for install.sh to install into, so what it needs
is ffmpeg, PyQt6 and python dikte.py, plus BlackHole for a meeting. The
settings also sit somewhere else there.
A Mac tester ran the suite on the 3.9 that ships with macOS and got 167
errors, all of them TestCase.enterContext, which arrived in 3.11. The
workflow already runs 3.11, 3.12 and 3.13; nothing said so out loud.
The README has Arch and Ubuntu on it, and the two things that differ on Fedora
are the two that decide whether anything works at all. The package names are
its own, and `systemctl --user enable --now ydotool` has nothing to enable
there: Fedora ships ydotool as a system service only, and its ydotoold holds a
root-owned socket at mode 600. The unit is green, the daemon is up, and every
paste is refused. The drop-in the README now spells out points ydotoold at
$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/.ydotool_socket and hands it over by uid, which is the path
the client already looks at, so nothing has to carry YDOTOOL_SOCKET. Red Hat
closed the same report as NOTABUG in 2023, so this stays a step the user takes
rather than one a later package will take for them.
install.sh was asking whether the unit was up, which is the question that
answers wrongly here. It now asks whether the socket is one this user may write
to, which is what auto-paste actually needs, and it names which of the three
ways it failed: a socket handed to nobody, a daemon that put its socket
somewhere else, or no daemon at all. On Arch and everywhere else the answer is
the same one as before.
ffmpeg-free out of Fedora's own repositories is enough, against the usual
advice to reach for RPM Fusion. That build disables four video decoders, h264,
hevc, vc1 and vvc, and keeps every audio decoder it has, AAC among them, while
Dikte only ever asks a video file for its audio track.
The models that run on this machine ask for nothing either, which is worth
saying because it is now the way Dikte starts. The Ubuntu builds run on Fedora
unchanged; whisper.cpp transcribed a clip here without a package being added,
and llama.cpp came down in its Vulkan build and found the card. That last part
is not luck: kwin-libs requires libvulkan.so.1, so the loader is on every
Plasma desktop by way of the compositor, and it recommends the Mesa drivers
alongside itself.
The settings window has four tabs it did not have when these were taken:
Agent, Meeting, Minutes and Shortcuts. Replace the four screenshots with
seven, at the same size and lossless as before. History goes without a
replacement rather than showing an old tab bar beside the new ones.
Running here is what the program does by default, and it was buried in a
paragraph under Install. Make it the first thing the feature list says,
and cut that paragraph back so the two do not repeat each other.
Three of master's changes land on the same lines as this branch, so most of
this is picking the newer shape and putting the local half back into it.
cleanup.py arrived while this was being written and is the right place for
a fourth provider, so the Target refactor of api.cleanup goes away: llama.cpp
becomes a name in cleanup.PROVIDERS next to OpenRouter, Claude Code and
Codex, and worker.py, meeting.py and filetranscribe.py go back to master's.
The settings window keeps master's one row per provider, hidden with
setRowVisible, rather than the two wrapper widgets this branch had. So does
speech to text, which was doing the same thing its own way.
The transcriber table has no room for a provider with no key and no base
URL, so the local one is answered before the lookup rather than added to
it, and an unknown name now falls back to openai by name: the shipped
default is no longer a key of that table.
The minutes stay on OpenRouter, which master already decided by routing
only the transcript through cleanup.run, so meeting_provider goes.
whisper-server is started on --inference-path /v1/audio/transcriptions,
which is exactly the path api.py already builds for the hosted providers,
and llama-server answers /chat/completions the way OpenRouter does. So the
local half is one more base URL rather than a second code path: worker.py,
filetranscribe.py and meeting.py are untouched, and dictation, subtitles
and meetings all work here on the first try.
Three findings worth naming, none of them in the new code:
whisper.cpp cuts segments on tokens, which in Turkish lands inside a word
about as often as between two. Pasted raw that gives "akraba değ\niller.";
in a subtitle it gives a cue reading "değ". Whisper marks the start of a
word with a leading space, so a piece that does not begin with one
continues the word above it.
A small model will repeat the transcript until the context is full, and
every one of those tokens is a second of somebody waiting: measured at 206
seconds, and 25 with a ceiling on the reply. Hosted models are left alone,
where the same runaway is rare and a ceiling would cut the minutes short.
A server outlives SIGTERM and SIGKILL holding its model in memory. Signals
are now turned into an event Qt delivers, since Qt blocks in C where a
Python handler never runs, and a pid file lets the next start sweep up
what a SIGKILL left behind.
The minutes keep their own provider rather than following cleanup's. The
two jobs are not the same size: a 4B model here will strip the filler words
out of a dictation and will not write up an hour long meeting.
The suite runs offline now: a test that reaches the network says so instead
of quietly going there.
Cleanup was the one step with only one place to run. Speech to text has three
providers behind a setting and the agent has three behind another, but the
model that drops the "eee"s out of a sentence was always a request to
OpenRouter, which meant a second key on a machine that already pays for a model
and already hands whole dictations to it as commands. Claude Code and Codex can
rewrite a sentence as easily as they can put something in your calendar, and
now they may.
cleanup.py is where that choice lives, so worker, the file transcriber and the
meeting all ask the same question rather than each building the same OpenRouter
request. What comes out of a CLI that failed is a CleanupError, which is an
ApiError, because to the chain a cleanup that failed is a cleanup that failed
however it was run: the raw transcript is still pasted and the reason still
shows in the corner, unchanged.
Neither CLI is given anything it does not need for the job. No tools, no MCP
servers, no session to resume, and the home directory rather than wherever the
agent is pointed, since a project's instructions have opinions about how text
should be written and none of them are about this transcript. The transcript
goes in fenced the same way the OpenRouter call fences it, because it is
material rather than an instruction however much of it reads like one. Claude
takes the cleanup rules as its whole system prompt; Codex has no system prompt
of its own, so they ride in front of the text, and its answer is read from the
file it writes on the way out rather than from a stdout that also carries a
header, its thinking and a token count.
The cost is seconds. OpenRouter answers in about one, a CLI in six or seven,
because each one opens a whole session to do it. That is the trade the box
says out loud, and the default has not moved: OpenRouter cleans up until you
say otherwise.
Codex's two lowest thinking levels now ask for "low". "minimal" was its bottom
rung until the newer models replaced it with "none", and each of them answers
the other's word with a 400, which the agent has been quietly hitting too.
In the settings window the model box belongs to whoever is chosen rather than
meaning three different things in turn, since an OpenRouter id and a Claude
alias do not belong in the same field, and under it is the same "found it or
not" line the agent tab has. dikte doctor asks about the program instead of the
key when a CLI does the cleaning, and the history records which model actually
did it.
install.sh has been the only half of its job that was written down. Removing
Dikte meant remembering a symlink, three desktop files, an autostart entry and
a handful of kglobalshortcutsrc keys, and updating meant a pull followed by
guessing which of those the new version had moved. Both are now scripts,
because both are lists somebody would otherwise keep in their head.
uninstall.sh removes what install.sh put down and stops there. What you have
written is yours: the settings and the dictations, the meetings and the
recordings survive a plain run, and --purge is the word that deletes them. It
prints what that would cost first, how many dictations, how many meetings, how
much audio, since a count is the thing that makes the sentence real, and
without a terminal to ask it refuses rather than assuming --yes. Only our own
symlink goes; a file of that name somebody else put there is left alone. The
shortcuts are handed back to `dikte shortcut remove` rather than unpicked from
KDE's file here, because that is the half that knows whether they went into
kglobalshortcutsrc or into GNOME's gsettings.
update.sh asks whether anything is waiting before it complains about anything
else, because an unfinished afternoon in the working tree is nobody's problem
on a day when nothing has been published. If something is waiting and you do
have edits of your own, it stops and says so rather than choosing for you. The
merge is --ff-only: an update is somebody else's commits arriving, never a
merge a script decided to make on your behalf.
Then install.sh runs again, since an update can add a dependency or move a
file, and it is told which keys you chose so that it puts those back instead of
its own defaults. They are read from the settings rather than from the
desktop's file, that being the one place they mean the same thing on KDE and on
GNOME, and a key you had turned off is passed back as the empty string rather
than quietly becoming the default again. Finally the running instance is
restarted, because it is still holding the code from before the pull.
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.
Reworked on top of master. The Groq request itself needed nothing beyond a key,
a base URL and a model id, but two providers fit in an if and an else where
three do not, and each one was written out four times: in transcribe_target(),
in the key rows of the settings window, in save and in load.
config.TRANSCRIBERS holds them now, one row each: the name the user sees and
the three settings that keep its key, its endpoint and its model. The variable
an empty key falls back to is the name of its setting, shouted. The provider
box, save, load, `dikte models --provider` and `dikte test-key` all read that
table, so a fourth provider is a row and a default rather than a branch in five
files. The key field, its Test button and its answer line are built once and
the three signals became one that carries which key was asked about.
The tests moved into the files of the modules they cover and check what a
provider actually changes: that the request goes to api.groq.com with the right
model and fields, that the glossary now reaches everything except OpenRouter,
that a Groq error says Groq, and that the settings window carries the key and
the model there and back. GROQ_API_KEY is cleared for the test run like the
other two, so a developer who has one does not send a test to the network.
Co-authored-by: Muzaffer Emre <[email protected]>
The socket carried a bare word and said nothing back, so a script could press
the buttons but never learn what was said. A request is JSON now, it can ask to
be answered when the run ends rather than when it starts, and the reply carries
the transcript, the agent's answer, or why nothing happened. The verbs that do
not need the microphone run in the caller's own process, which is what makes
transcribing a file or reading a setting work over ssh.
Cleaning up a dictation and cleaning up a file are not the same job, and until
now they shared one prompt. A dictation is read afterwards, so dropping a
filler and tightening a sentence is a favour. A file becomes an SRT, and there
the same favour is damage: the viewer hears the words while the line is on
screen, so a word that was said and is not written is noticed, and a phrase
pulled onto the line above is on screen before it is spoken.
So the file path gets its own system prompt. It says what the text is and what
it is for, and it spends its room on the one repair only context can make: the
word the transcriber misheard. Speech models fail phonetically on names, and
somebody talking about Anthropic said "Claude", not "cloud". The lines stay
where they are, nothing is shortened, nothing is turned into an abbreviation,
and the filler words stay because they were said out loud.
The glossary and the timestamp rule are appended as before, so a name listed
under Cleanup rules still reaches this prompt, and a timestamped run still gets
told to leave the stamps alone. The dictation prompt is untouched, and so are
the meeting and agent paths.
Cleanup rules now has a tab each. An untouched prompt is still stored empty, so
switching the interface language keeps switching the prompt language with it.
The two shared one state machine, which meant an agent thinking for a minute
was a minute in which nothing could be dictated. That is the wrong trade: the
work has nothing in common past the microphone, and the microphone is busy for
the seconds you are speaking, not the minute afterwards.
So they are two flows now, each with its own state, its own pipeline and its own
indicator. Either can be working while the other records. Only the recorder is
taken in turns, because there is one of it: whichever asks second is refused
while the first holds it, and the menu entry greys out to say so rather than
failing quietly. "Am I recording" is read off the two states rather than off the
recorder's owner, which outlives the recording by the moment it takes the audio
to arrive, and would otherwise report a microphone as busy after it was free.
Two indicators in one corner would sit on top of each other, so an indicator can
be told what it stacks on: it offsets by that one's height while it is showing
and drops back into the corner when it goes, which the animation timer notices
without anything having to tell it.
Pasting is now under a lock. It is three steps rather than one, read the
clipboard, write ours, press the key, and two runs finishing together would
paste one answer and restore the other's clipboard over it.
Calling off the agent is its own menu entry and its own command, instead of a
cancel that meant different things depending on what was running. The tray icon
still ends whichever recording is going.
Four things the first use of it turned up.
The tab was called Claude while the setting inside it chooses between three
providers, two of which are not Claude. It is Agent now, and the messages that
pointed at it by name point at the new one.
The three global shortcuts were the only fields in the window you had to know
the syntax of to fill in, next to a paste key that has been a dropdown all
along. They are editable combo boxes now, sharing one shortlist of combinations
that are usually free. Typing your own still works; it is just no longer the
only way.
The instruction was read as discouraging the tools, which is the opposite of the
point. "Keep it short" is about the answer, and a model that reads it as "answer
off the top of your head" hands back a caveat about its training data instead of
the thing it was asked. Asked who won the 2026 World Cup it answered, twice, that
the tournament had not been played, on the 28th of July. So shortness is now
stated as being about the answer rather than the work, and writing a caveat is
named as the moment to go and look instead. Same question, same model, only the
prompt changed: no tool calls and a wrong answer before, a web search and the
right one after. It also appended its sources, which a reply being pasted into
someone's text field has no use for, so that is ruled out alongside the headings
and the bullet lists.
Clicking the tray icon during a Claude recording did nothing, because the icon
was wired to the dictation toggle and that one leaves the other mode's recording
alone on purpose. The shortcuts should stay tied to their own mode; the icon is
one button and now ends whichever recording is running.
Everything the last commit built assumed one agent was installed, which is a
poor assumption to bake into a dictation tool. So the provider is a setting, and
what it selects is one of three quite different things.
Claude Code and Codex are the same shape: a CLI, streaming JSONL, a session id
to resume, tools that reach the machine and whatever is connected to it. They
share the runner. What differs is spelled out where it differs, which is more
than the flag names: Codex has no system prompt to append, so the instruction
rides in front of the command with a rule between them; it confines its commands
in a sandbox rather than asking about them, so the permission setting is a
sandbox mode; and `-s` is not accepted by `exec resume`, so both settings go
through `-c` overrides, which are.
OpenRouter is the odd one and is meant to be. No tools, no files, no calendar:
it can say what the capital of Peru is and not what is in your diary, and the
settings box says so rather than letting it be discovered. It also has no
session to resume, so the conversation is kept here and resent, capped at 24
messages.
A stored conversation names the provider that made it, and is ignored by any
other: none of them can pick up another's thread, and a stale id would otherwise
fail every command until the timeout cleared it.
The interface calls the thing by its name, which in Turkish means the suffix has
to agree with it: Claude'a but Codex'e, Claude'u but Codex'i. A name dropped
into a sentence through t() cannot be inflected by that sentence, so it arrives
inflected, from a small table in i18n. English takes the name as it is and keeps
the preposition in the sentence.
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.
whisper-1's verbose response carries a start and an end for every segment,
and the file tab was reading only the start, to build the [mm:ss] prefix.
Keeping the end as well is all an SRT needs.
The text stays the authority on wording and the segments on timing; they
meet at that prefix, which the cleanup model is already told to leave alone.
So a transcript that went through cleanup still turns into properly timed
subtitles. A line whose stamp matches no segment runs until the next line
starts, a line with no stamp at all joins the cue above it, and an end that
would run into the next cue is trimmed back.
The button is dead until a timestamped run finishes, because without
timestamps there are no segments to time anything with.
OpenRouter mirrors OpenAI's /audio/transcriptions field for field, so one
multipart request serves both providers and only the key, the base URL and
the model id change. That puts a dozen speech models behind the key that was
already there for the cleanup, and makes a single OpenRouter key enough for
the whole chain.
Its transcription endpoint takes no hint field, so the words from Cleanup
rules are not sent there; they still reach the cleanup model as a glossary.
Timestamps switch to openai/whisper-1, the namespaced id of the only model
that returns segment times.
The API tab is now grouped by role rather than by service, because a key no
longer belongs to a single job: both keys sit at the top, the two jobs below.
Each provider keeps its own model, so switching back and forth does not
overwrite the other one's.
"Shortcut presses during Transcribing… are ignored" read as though Dikte
blocked the session's shortcuts while it worked. It only ignores its own:
pressing Ctrl+Space with a transcript in flight does nothing and queues
nothing, while the rest of KDE keeps working normally. That is now said
where it belongs, next to the indicator.
The rest is shorter. Silence detection, misheard words and file
transcription became bullets under one heading, the settings table is gone
because the window already says what each setting does, and Known limits
folded into a line under the file map. The numbers worth knowing stayed: the
10 dB over each recording's own noise floor, the 0.3 s, the -55 dBFS, and
the one logout KWin needs before the global shortcut fires.
The cleanup prompt now asks the model to fix words the transcriber misheard
when the context makes the intended one clear, and to leave them alone when
it does not. Speech models fail phonetically on proper nouns, and that is
exactly what context can recover.
The names you enter for the transcription hint are handed to the cleanup
model as a glossary too. Knowing the spelling is what lets it recognise
"kuber netis" as Kubernetes.
A failed cleanup used to be almost invisible: the raw transcript was pasted
and a progress line flashed by, so a rejected key looked exactly like
working dictation for days. It now leaves the indicator amber with the
reason, sends a notification, and records the error in the history. HTTP
401, 402 and 429 are reported as what they are, naming the service.
Also:
- Settings can test the OpenRouter key, not just the OpenAI one
- Tray menu and CLI gained Restart, which re-execs in place
- Defaults saved into the config by older versions are recognised by their
fingerprint and dropped, so an untouched prompt keeps getting improvements
- The IPC socket is user-only; Qt puts it in /tmp
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
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