Sotto overview

Sotto is voice dictation that runs entirely on your own machine. Press a global shortcut, speak, and the text appears in whatever application has focus.

Every sample is processed locally. No account, no server, no telemetry. The only network request Sotto ever makes is downloading a speech model, once, when you ask for it.

How it works

1. 1
   Press the shortcut

   Meta+Alt+D by default. A small dark pill appears at the bottom of your active monitor.

2. 2
   Speak

   The pill shows a live level meter and a live transcript, so you can see it is hearing you. Text appears as you talk, not only at the end.

3. 3
   Press it again

   Sotto finishes the last utterance, formats everything, and puts the result into the focused application.

What makes it different

• Local. whisper.cpp runs on your GPU or CPU. Audio never leaves the machine, and there is nothing to sign in to.
• Proper writing. Punctuation and capitalisation come from the model; Sotto adds paragraph breaks when you pause, understands spoken “new line” and “new paragraph”, and strips the noise markers a transcriber emits.
• It goes where you are typing. Text is pasted into the focused app, typed key by key, or left on the clipboard — your choice.
• It never steals focus. The dictation pill is a layer-shell surface: it cannot be focused, and tiling compositors will not tile it.

Requirements

Sotto is early v1, developed and tested on Arch Linux with Plasma 6 on Wayland and an AMD GPU with ROCm. Expect rough edges elsewhere.

Where to go next

Compared to cloud dictation