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

Open the Sotto docs

Installing, dictating, models, formatting.

Privacy and licence

What the local-only guarantee actually covers.

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What makes it different

Every sample is processed on your machine. There is no account, no server component, and no telemetry. The only network request Sotto ever makes is downloading a speech model, once, when you ask it to. The LOCAL badge on the dictation pill is a permanent reminder of that. Under the hood it runs whisper.cpp with GPU acceleration — ROCm on AMD, or Vulkan, or CUDA on NVIDIA.

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What you get

  • A global shortcut (Meta+Alt+D by default) that starts and stops dictation
  • A small pill at the bottom of your active monitor with a live level meter and a live transcript
  • Real writing, not word soup: punctuation and capitalisation from Whisper, paragraph breaks when you pause, and spoken “new line” / “new paragraph” commands
  • Three ways to get text out: pasted into the focused app, typed key by key, or left on the clipboard
  • A built-in notepad for dictating without inserting anywhere
  • Settings for the model, shortcut, microphone, output method and monitor

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Platform

Linux, Wayland, KDE Plasma (KWin) first. The dictation overlay uses wlr-layer-shell, so it is never focusable and never tiled. Hyprland and other wlroots compositors are on the roadmap; GNOME falls back to an ordinary always-on-top window; Windows and macOS are not supported. Status: early v1, developed and tested on Arch Linux with Plasma 6 on Wayland and an AMD GPU.

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Licence

Sotto is being released as open source under the Apache License 2.0. See Privacy and licence.