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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.
165 lines
8.2 KiB
Markdown
165 lines
8.2 KiB
Markdown
# Dikte
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Press `Ctrl+Space`, talk, press again. The recording goes to OpenAI or OpenRouter
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for transcription, a model on OpenRouter cleans it up (dropping the *uh*s, the
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restarts, the missing punctuation), and the result lands in your clipboard and
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is pasted into whatever window you were typing in.
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Built for KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland. No dependencies beyond system packages:
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just the Python standard library and PyQt6.
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*[Türkçe README](README.tr.md)*
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<p align="center">
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<img src="docs/settings-general.webp" width="820" alt="Dikte settings, General tab">
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</p>
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| <img src="docs/settings-api.webp" width="410" alt="API and models"> | <img src="docs/settings-cleanup.webp" width="410" alt="Cleanup rules"> |
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| <img src="docs/settings-audio-file.webp" width="410" alt="Audio file"> | <img src="docs/settings-history.webp" width="410" alt="History"> |
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## Install
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```sh
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sudo pacman -S --needed pipewire-audio wl-clipboard ydotool ffmpeg python-pyqt6
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systemctl --user enable --now ydotool # needed for auto-paste
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./install.sh # or: ./install.sh "Meta+Space" "Meta+Shift+Space"
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dikte # the settings window opens on first run
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```
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On Ubuntu/GNOME X11, recording uses PulseAudio and clipboard/paste use the X11
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tools instead:
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```sh
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sudo apt install pulseaudio-utils xclip xdotool ffmpeg
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```
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`install.sh` adds the `dikte` command, a menu entry, an autostart entry and the
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two global shortcuts, whose keys are its two arguments.
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Three keys go in the settings window: **OpenAI**, **Groq** and **OpenRouter**.
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Speech to text runs on any of them (`gpt-4o-transcribe` by default), cleanup
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always on OpenRouter (`google/gemini-3.5-flash-lite`), so a single OpenRouter key
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can cover both. They fall back to `OPENAI_API_KEY`, `GROQ_API_KEY` and
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`OPENROUTER_API_KEY`, and are
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stored in `~/.config/dikte/config.json`, mode 600. Cleanup can be switched off,
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in which case the raw transcript is pasted, and a thinking model's effort can be
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set next to it.
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## Using it
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| What | How |
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| --- | --- |
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| Start / stop recording | `Ctrl+Space`, or click the tray icon |
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| Discard the recording | `Ctrl+Alt+Space`, tray menu, or `dikte cancel` |
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| Speak a command to an agent | Tray menu → *Ask Claude*, or `dikte ask` |
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| Start / end a meeting | Tray menu → *Record a meeting*, or `dikte meeting` |
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| Settings | Tray menu → *Settings*, or `dikte settings` |
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| Reload after an update | Tray menu → *Restart*, or `dikte restart` |
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| Quit | Tray menu → *Quit*, or `dikte quit` |
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An indicator in the screen corner shows a red dot, a live waveform and the
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elapsed time, then the stage it is on. It never takes focus. Pressing
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`Ctrl+Space` again while Dikte is still working does nothing; nothing queues up.
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A dictation and a command to the agent do wait on each other for the microphone,
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which is one device, but for nothing else: each has its own indicator, and the
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second one stacks above the first while both are up.
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Everything the settings window holds has a verb of its own too, so a script or
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an agent can work the whole thing: `dikte record --seconds 8` says back what was
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said, `dikte transcribe talk.mp4 --srt` writes subtitles, and the settings, the
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history and the meetings are there beside them. `dikte --help` lists them, they
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all take `--json`, and only the ones needing the microphone need the application
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running.
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## What it does
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- **Silence never reaches the API.** Handed near-silence, a transcription model
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invents a sentence instead of returning nothing ("Thanks for watching", or in
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Turkish "Altyazı M.K."). A recording is dropped when nothing rose 10 dB above
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*that recording's own* noise floor for at least 0.3 s, which is also what
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removes steady fan noise however loud, or when its loud end sits below
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-55 dBFS. The indicator reports the level it measured, which is what you
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calibrate the threshold against.
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- **Misheard words are repaired.** Speech models fail phonetically on proper
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nouns, so the cleanup model is asked to fix those from context, and to leave
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the word alone when the context does not make the intended one clear. The names
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you list under Cleanup rules go to the transcription model as a hint and to the
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cleanup model as a glossary, which is what lets it recognise "kuber netis":
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```
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raw ıı bugün şey kuber netis üzerinde çalışan servisleri güncelledim
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yani sonra grafanada bir panel açtım hani ve pay kut ile arayüzü
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şey bitirdim işte
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result Bugün Kubernetes üzerinde çalışan servisleri güncelledim. Sonra
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Grafana'da bir panel açtım ve PyQt ile arayüzü bitirdim.
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```
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- **A failed cleanup is never silent.** The raw transcript is still pasted so the
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dictation is not lost, but the indicator turns amber with the reason instead of
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looking like a normal run.
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- **A dictation can be a command instead.** Its own shortcut sends the
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transcript to Claude Code (`claude -p`) rather than pasting it, and pastes back
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what comes of it: the answer, or a sentence saying what was done. It is the
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session you would have opened yourself, so your skills and connected services
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are there, which is what makes "put that in my calendar on Thursday at three"
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a thing you can say to a window that is not Claude. Codex (`codex exec`) runs
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the same way, and OpenRouter is there as a plain question-and-answer fallback
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for a machine with neither CLI on it. Provider, model, permissions and working
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directory are under Settings → Agent, and commands close together stay in one
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conversation.
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- **Meetings** are recorded from the microphone and the speaker output at the
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same time, which settles who said what by the channel a voice arrived on
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instead of guessing at it. The two sides are transcribed separately and
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interleaved into one timestamped transcript, and a second model, configured
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under Settings → Meeting along with its own instruction, turns that into
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minutes: decisions, action items, open questions. They land in
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`~/.local/share/dikte/meetings` and in Settings → Minutes. A run that fails
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keeps its recording, and a retry resumes from the transcript it already paid
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for.
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- **Audio and video files** run through the same models under Settings → Audio
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file, optionally with `[mm:ss]` timestamps, chunked through ffmpeg when long,
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and saved as `.txt` or as `.srt` subtitles; their cleanup follows its own rules,
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written for subtitles, so the lines keep their place and nothing is shortened.
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- **History** of every dictation under Settings → History, with a size limit and
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right-click to delete.
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- **Turkish and English interface**, following the system locale by default.
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## The global shortcuts need one logout
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KWin only reads `kglobalshortcutsrc` at startup, so the shortcuts `install.sh`
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writes will not fire until you log out and back in. Until then, Settings →
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Shortcuts → **built-in listener** reads `/dev/input` and catches the combination
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itself. The difference: it does not swallow the key, so `Ctrl+Space` also reaches
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the focused application (some editors will pop up autocomplete). The listener
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needs your user in the `input` group: `sudo usermod -aG input $USER`.
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## Layout
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```
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dikte.py entry point, tray icon, state machine
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cli.py the command line: every verb, and what it answers with
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ipc.py one request and one reply over the local socket
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audio.py PCM capture: pw-record for dictation, ffmpeg for a meeting
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meeting.py channel split, speaker labelling, cleanup, minutes
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assistant.py running a dictation through Claude Code, Codex or OpenRouter
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api.py transcription on either provider, OpenRouter cleanup (stdlib only)
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worker.py transcribe → clean up → clipboard → paste
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vad.py deciding whether a recording holds speech at all
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filetranscribe.py file transcription: ffmpeg, chunking, timestamps
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overlay.py the corner indicator
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settings_ui.py settings window
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hotkey.py KDE shortcut installation and the evdev listener
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paste.py wl-clipboard and ydotool wrappers
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i18n.py the string table
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```
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The indicator is drawn through XWayland, because a Wayland client cannot place a
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window in a screen corner; `dikte.py` sets `QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb` for that.
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## License
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GPL-3.0, see [LICENSE](LICENSE).
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