yusufipk
2cbc369132
The History tab was read-only, so the only way to get rid of a dictation was to edit history.jsonl by hand. Entries can now be removed: right-click or Delete drops the selection, "Clear history" empties the file, and the Ctrl/Shift selection lets several go at once. Deleting more than one asks first, since there is no undo. The cap on the file has existed since the first commit but was never reachable from the interface. It is now a spinbox in the same tab, applied the moment you save rather than on the next dictation, and 0 turns it off. Trimming rewrites the file only when it is actually over the cap, instead of on every single dictation, and does it through a temporary file so a crash cannot leave a half-written history behind. Deletion matches an entry on its whole content, not on its line number: the worker may well have appended a new dictation while the window sat open. Save no longer closes the window. It confirms and stays put, so you can settle several things in one sitting; the cross closes it. Cancel is gone with it, because it would be a lie next to a Save that already wrote.
Dikte
Press Ctrl+Space, talk, press again. The recording goes to OpenAI for
transcription, a model on OpenRouter cleans it up (dropping the uhs, the
restarts, the missing punctuation), and the result lands in your clipboard and
is pasted into whatever window you were typing in.
Built for KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland. No dependencies beyond system packages: just the Python standard library and PyQt6.
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Install
./install.sh # or: ./install.sh "Ctrl+Alt+Space"
dikte # the settings window opens on first run
System packages (Arch/CachyOS):
sudo pacman -S --needed pipewire-audio wl-clipboard ydotool ffmpeg python-pyqt6
systemctl --user enable --now ydotool # needed for auto-paste
Two API keys go in the settings window:
- OpenAI: speech to text (
gpt-4o-transcribe). Falls back to theOPENAI_API_KEYenvironment variable when left empty. - OpenRouter: transcript cleanup (
google/gemini-3.5-flash-liteby default, any model on the list works). Falls back toOPENROUTER_API_KEY. Cleanup can be switched off entirely, in which case the raw transcript is pasted.
Using it
| What | How |
|---|---|
| Start / stop recording | Ctrl+Space, or click the tray icon |
| Cancel a recording | Tray menu → Cancel recording, or dikte cancel |
| Settings | Tray menu → Settings, or dikte settings |
| Reload after an update | Tray menu → Restart, or dikte restart |
| Quit | Tray menu → Quit, or dikte quit |
While recording, a small indicator sits in the bottom-left corner of the screen: a red dot, a live waveform, the elapsed time. Then it walks through "Transcribing…", "Cleaning up…" and finally shows the first line of what it pasted. The indicator never takes focus, so you stay in the window you were working in.
Silence never reaches the API
Handed near-silence, a transcription model does not return an empty string.
It invents one. Whisper is notorious for answering a quiet two seconds with
"Thanks for watching" or, in Turkish, "Altyazı M.K.". An accidental
Ctrl+Space would otherwise cost you an API call and paste a sentence you
never said.
Dikte checks before spending the call, and the check is relative rather than absolute, because microphone gain varies far too much between machines for a fixed threshold to mean anything. A recording is dropped when any of these holds:
- the loud end of it sits below the absolute floor (default -55 dBFS);
- nothing rose 10 dB above this recording's own noise floor for at least 0.3 s, which is also what removes steady fan or hiss, however loud;
- the level never moved at all near the floor.
When something slips through anyway, a second filter catches the handful of stock phrases the models fall back on, but only for clips under six seconds, so a genuine "thanks for watching the demo" survives.
The indicator reports the level it measured (No speech detected (-56 dB)),
which is what you calibrate the threshold against if your microphone is
unusually quiet or unusually noisy.
Repairing misheard words
Speech models mangle proper nouns. Product names, technical terms and acronyms come back as something that sounds right and means nothing, and no amount of punctuation fixing helps if the word itself is wrong. The cleanup model is asked to repair those from context, and to leave the word alone when the context does not make the intended one clear, so it corrects rather than guesses.
The list of names you enter under Cleanup rules does double duty here: it goes
to the transcription model as a hint, and to the cleanup model as a glossary.
Knowing how a name is spelled is what lets the second model recognise it in a
garbled transcript. With Kubernetes, Grafana, PyQt
in that box:
raw ıı bugün şey kuber netis üzerinde çalışan servisleri güncelledim
yani sonra grafanada bir panel açtım hani ve pay kut ile arayüzü
şey bitirdim işte
result Bugün Kubernetes üzerinde çalışan servisleri güncelledim. Sonra
Grafana'da bir panel açtım ve PyQt ile arayüzü bitirdim.
When cleanup itself fails, a rejected key or an empty account, the raw transcript is still pasted so the dictation is never lost, but the indicator turns amber and says what went wrong, with the full reason in a notification. It never quietly hands you an uncleaned transcript as though the model had run.
Transcribing a file
Settings → Audio file takes any audio or video file and runs it through the same models. Two options, both remembered between runs:
- Add timestamps: prefixes every segment with
[mm:ss]. This switches towhisper-1, the only model that returns segment times. - Run the cleanup model afterwards: same cleanup as live dictation, with an extra rule telling the model to leave the timestamps alone.
Long files are converted to 16 kHz mono with ffmpeg and split into ten-minute
chunks, each transcribed in turn with its timestamps shifted into place. The
result can be copied or saved as .txt.
About the global shortcut
KWin only reads kglobalshortcutsrc at startup. install.sh writes the
shortcut to the right place, but it will not fire until you log out and back
in. Two ways around that:
- Log out and in. This is the clean solution: the key is swallowed by KWin, so it never leaks into other applications.
- Settings → Shortcut → turn on the built-in listener. It reads
/dev/inputand catches the combination itself, working immediately. The difference: it does not swallow the key, soCtrl+Spacealso reaches the focused application (some editors will pop up autocomplete). If that bothers you, change the shortcut to something likeCtrl+Alt+Space.
The built-in listener needs your user to be in the input group:
sudo usermod -aG input $USER.
Settings
Stored in ~/.config/dikte/config.json, mode 600, since the API keys live there.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Interface language | Turkish, English, or follow the system locale |
| Microphone | Pick a specific source or use the default |
| Speech language | Language hint for transcription, or automatic detection |
| Paste key | ctrl+v / ctrl+shift+v / shift+insert. Terminals usually want the second |
| Restore clipboard | Puts your previous clipboard back after pasting |
| Skip silent recordings | Drops recordings with no speech before any API call, see above |
| Cleanup rules | The system prompt handed to the cleanup model. This is where you decide how much it may touch your words |
| Names and terms | A hint for the transcription model and a glossary for the cleanup model, so your proper nouns survive |
| Keep audio files | WAVs are kept in ~/.local/share/dikte/recordings |
History lives in ~/.local/share/dikte/history.jsonl; the last 200 entries are
browsable under Settings → History.
Layout
dikte.py entry point, tray icon, state machine, IPC
audio.py raw PCM capture through pw-record plus the level meter
api.py OpenAI transcription and OpenRouter cleanup (stdlib only)
worker.py transcribe → clean up → clipboard → paste
vad.py deciding whether a recording holds speech at all
filetranscribe.py file transcription: ffmpeg, chunking, timestamps
overlay.py the corner indicator
settings_ui.py settings window
hotkey.py KDE shortcut installation and the evdev listener
paste.py wl-clipboard and ydotool wrappers
i18n.py the string table
Known limits
- The indicator is drawn through XWayland, because a Wayland client cannot
place a window in a screen corner.
dikte.pysetsQT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcbfor this reason. - Auto-paste goes through
ydotool's virtual keyboard. Without a runningydotooldthe text is only copied, and the indicator says so. - Shortcut presses during "Transcribing…" are ignored.
License
GPL-3.0, see LICENSE.