> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.mauvely.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Sotto

> Fully local voice dictation for Linux. Press a shortcut, speak, and formatted text appears in whatever app has focus. Nothing leaves your machine.

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.

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Open the Sotto docs" icon="book-open" href="/sotto/overview">
    Installing, dictating, models, formatting.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Privacy and licence" icon="lock" href="/sotto/privacy">
    What the local-only guarantee actually covers.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## 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](https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp) with GPU
acceleration — ROCm on AMD, or Vulkan, or CUDA on NVIDIA.

## 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

## 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.

## Licence

Sotto is being released as open source under the **Apache License 2.0**. See
[Privacy and licence](/sotto/privacy).