Dictating

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:

Mode	Behaviour
Toggle (default)	Press to start, press again to stop
Hold to talk	Hold the keys down, release to stop

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.

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.

Getting text into an application

Wayland has no universal “type this” facility, so Sotto picks the best strategy available. Configure it in Settings → Output.

Mode	What happens	Needs
Clipboard + paste (default)	Sets the clipboard, synthesises Ctrl V, restores your old clipboard	wl-clipboard, plus either ydotool or a one-time RemoteDesktop permission
Type it	Types the text key by key	ydotool
Clipboard only	Copies the text; you paste it yourself	wl-clipboard

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.

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.

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.