dikte/README.md

Dikte

Press Ctrl+Space, talk, press again. The recording is transcribed on this machine by default, a model 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, and runs on GNOME X11, macOS and Windows too. No dependencies beyond system packages: just the Python standard library, 3.11 or newer, and PyQt6.

Türkçe README

Install

sudo pacman -S --needed pipewire-audio wl-clipboard ydotool ffmpeg python-pyqt6
systemctl --user enable --now ydotool     # needed for auto-paste

./install.sh                 # or:  ./install.sh "Meta+Space" "Meta+Shift+Space"
dikte                        # the settings window opens on first run

On Fedora the packages are named differently, ffmpeg-free out of Fedora's own repositories is enough because Dikte only ever takes the audio track of a video file, and ydotool takes one step more: it ships as a system service, whose socket stays root-owned and out of your session's reach, so auto-paste fails with the daemon running. Point it at the path the client already looks at and hand the socket over:

sudo dnf install pipewire-utils wl-clipboard ydotool ffmpeg-free python3-pyqt6
sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/ydotool.service.d
printf '[Service]\nExecStart=\nExecStart=/usr/bin/ydotoold --socket-path=%s/.ydotool_socket --socket-own=%s:%s\n' \
  "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR" "$(id -u)" "$(id -g)" \
  | sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/ydotool.service.d/override.conf >/dev/null
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now ydotool

On Ubuntu/GNOME X11, recording uses PulseAudio and clipboard/paste use the X11 tools instead:

sudo apt install pulseaudio-utils xclip xdotool ffmpeg

macOS has no shortcut registry for install.sh to install into, so the listener that catches the keys is the mechanism there and there is nothing to run: brew install ffmpeg, pip install PyQt6, then python dikte.py. A meeting needs BlackHole or Loopback, because nothing else offers what the speakers are playing.

Windows works the same way, holding the keys through the system's own hotkey service while Dikte runs: winget install Gyan.FFmpeg, pip install PyQt6, then python dikte.py, with an optional install.ps1 for the Start Menu entry and the dikte command. Meetings are not supported there yet; the details are in the Windows README.

install.sh adds the dikte command, a menu entry, an autostart entry and the two global shortcuts, whose keys are its two arguments. ./update.sh pulls and puts all of that back, keeping the keys you chose; ./uninstall.sh takes it away again and leaves your settings and dictations alone unless you pass --purge.

Speech to text and cleanup each pick a provider in the settings window, and both run here by default, on models of your own. The cloud is the other option: speech to text on OpenAI, Groq or OpenRouter (gpt-4o-transcribe), cleanup on OpenRouter (google/gemini-3.5-flash-lite) or, when either is installed, on Claude Code or Codex. The keys fall back to OPENAI_API_KEY, GROQ_API_KEY and OPENROUTER_API_KEY, and are stored in ~/.config/dikte/config.json, mode 600, or in ~/Library/Application Support/Dikte on a Mac. Cleanup can be switched off, in which case the raw transcript is pasted, and a thinking model's effort can be set next to it.

Using it

What	How
Start / stop recording	Ctrl+Space, or click the tray icon
Discard the recording	Ctrl+Alt+Space, tray menu, or dikte cancel
Speak a command to an agent	Tray menu → Ask Claude, or dikte ask
Start / end a meeting	Tray menu → Record a meeting, or dikte meeting
Settings	Tray menu → Settings, or dikte settings
Reload after an update	Tray menu → Restart, or dikte restart
Quit	Tray menu → Quit, or dikte quit

An indicator in the screen corner shows a red dot, a live waveform and the elapsed time, then the stage it is on. It never takes focus. Pressing Ctrl+Space again while Dikte is still working does nothing; nothing queues up. A dictation and a command to the agent do wait on each other for the microphone, which is one device, but for nothing else: each has its own indicator, and the second one stacks above the first while both are up.

Everything the settings window holds has a verb of its own too, so a script or an agent can work the whole thing: dikte record --seconds 8 says back what was said, dikte transcribe talk.mp4 --srt writes subtitles, and the settings, the history and the meetings are there beside them. dikte --help lists them, they all take --json, and only the ones needing the microphone need the application running.

What it does

• It all runs on this machine by default. Speech to text on whisper.cpp and cleanup on llama.cpp, neither installed beforehand: the settings window fetches the program and the model, verifies the sha256 and refuses a download published without one, then keeps a server alive while you dictate. The graphics card is reached through CUDA, ROCm or Vulkan where the build allows. No key, no account, nothing leaving the machine.

• Silence never reaches the API. Handed near-silence, a transcription model invents a sentence instead of returning nothing ("Thanks for watching", or in Turkish "Altyazı M.K."). A recording is dropped when nothing rose 10 dB above that recording's own noise floor for at least 0.3 s, which is also what removes steady fan noise however loud, or when its loud end sits below -55 dBFS. The indicator reports the level it measured, which is what you calibrate the threshold against.

• Misheard words are repaired. Speech models fail phonetically on proper nouns, so the cleanup model is asked to fix those from context, and to leave the word alone when the context does not make the intended one clear. The names you list under Cleanup rules go to the transcription model as a hint and to the cleanup model as a glossary, which is what lets it recognise "kuber netis":

  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.
  

• A failed cleanup is never silent. The raw transcript is still pasted so the dictation is not lost, but the indicator turns amber with the reason instead of looking like a normal run.

• A dictation can be a command instead. Its own shortcut sends the transcript to Claude Code (claude -p) rather than pasting it, and pastes back what comes of it: the answer, or a sentence saying what was done. It is the session you would have opened yourself, so your skills and connected services are there, which is what makes "put that in my calendar on Thursday at three" a thing you can say to a window that is not Claude. Codex (codex exec) runs the same way, and OpenRouter is there as a plain question-and-answer fallback for a machine with neither CLI on it. Provider, model, permissions and working directory are under Settings → Agent, and commands close together stay in one conversation.

• Meetings are recorded from the microphone and the speaker output at the same time, which settles who said what by the channel a voice arrived on instead of guessing at it. The two sides are transcribed separately and interleaved into one timestamped transcript, and a second model, configured under Settings → Meeting along with its own instruction, turns that into minutes: decisions, action items, open questions. They land in ~/.local/share/dikte/meetings and in Settings → Minutes. A run that fails keeps its recording, and a retry resumes from the transcript it already paid for.

• Audio and video files run through the same models under Settings → Audio file, optionally with [mm:ss] timestamps, chunked through ffmpeg when long, and saved as .txt or as .srt subtitles; their cleanup follows its own rules, written for subtitles, so the lines keep their place and nothing is shortened.

• History of every dictation under Settings → History, with a size limit and right-click to delete.

• Turkish and English interface, following the system locale by default.

The global shortcuts need one logout

KWin only reads kglobalshortcutsrc at startup, so the shortcuts install.sh writes will not fire until you log out and back in. Until then, Settings → Shortcuts → built-in listener reads /dev/input and catches the combination itself. The difference: it does not swallow the key, so Ctrl+Space also reaches the focused application (some editors will pop up autocomplete). The listener needs your user in the input group: sudo usermod -aG input $USER.

Layout

dikte.py          entry point, tray icon, state machine
cli.py            the command line: every verb, and what it answers with
ipc.py            one request and one reply over the local socket
audio.py          PCM capture: pw-record for dictation, ffmpeg for a meeting
meeting.py        channel split, speaker labelling, cleanup, minutes
assistant.py      running a dictation through Claude Code, Codex or OpenRouter
api.py            transcription and cleanup requests (stdlib only)
cleanup.py        who rewrites the transcript: OpenRouter, here, Claude or Codex
ggml.py           whisper.cpp and llama.cpp here: fetch, verify, keep serving
hub.py            what GitHub and Hugging Face have on offer today
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

The indicator is drawn through XWayland, because a Wayland client cannot place a window in a screen corner; dikte.py sets QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb for that.

License

GPL-3.0, see LICENSE.