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The shortcut

Meta+Alt+D by default. Change or disable it in Settings → Shortcut; it also appears in your desktop’s own shortcut settings. Two modes:
Sotto uses the desktop’s GlobalShortcuts portal, which Plasma 5.25 and later provide. If your desktop does not have it, disable the shortcut in Settings and bind sotto --toggle to a key in your desktop’s own shortcut settings instead — it works identically.

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The overlay

A small dark pill at the bottom of your active monitor:
  • A live level meter, so you can see it is hearing you
  • The live transcript, which updates roughly once a second while you talk
  • A LOCAL badge — a standing reminder that nothing is being sent anywhere
The overlay never takes focus and never gets tiled by a tiling compositor. It is drawn as a layer surface rather than a window, which is what makes both true by construction. By default it appears on whichever monitor is active, re-evaluated every time it is shown. Pick a fixed monitor in Settings → Appearance if you would rather it always be in one place.
Animations can be turned off entirely in Settings → Appearance — worth doing if you find movement distracting, or on a machine where every frame matters.

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What happens while you speak

Sotto does not wait until you stop:
  • A pause of about 0.7 seconds ends the current utterance and commits it.
  • While you are still speaking, the in-progress utterance is re-transcribed roughly every 1.1 seconds so the live transcript keeps up.
  • Very short bursts are discarded as noise rather than transcribed as a stray word.
  • Each committed utterance is fed forward as context, so names and terminology stay consistent across a long dictation.
The practical effect: partial text appears within about a second, an utterance settles about 0.7 seconds after you stop talking, and the whole thing is finished and inserted a fraction of a second after you press the shortcut again.

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Getting text into an application

Wayland has no universal “type this” facility, so Sotto picks the best strategy available. Configure it in Settings → Output.
Terminals usually paste with Ctrl Shift V, not Ctrl V. The default mode’s paste keystroke will not work there. Use Type it or Clipboard only when dictating into a terminal.
Your previous clipboard contents are restored after a paste by default. Turn that off in Settings if you would rather the dictated text stay on the clipboard.

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Choosing a microphone

Settings → Audio lists your input devices. Sotto accepts whatever format the device provides and converts it internally, so there is nothing to match up.
A headset microphone makes a bigger difference to accuracy than a bigger model does. Whisper is good; it is not good enough to overcome a laptop microphone across a room.

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Dictating without inserting anywhere

Open the Notepad — from the tray menu, or sotto --notepad — press Record, and the formatted text accumulates in a window with a Copy button. Useful for drafting, and for when the target application does not accept synthesised input. See Notepad and CLI.