dicta

README

dicta

A Linux/Wayland-first voice dictation daemon written in pure Go.

dicta is two things:

1. Type-mode — press Pause, talk, and the daemon types the transcribed text into whatever window has focus, committing each utterance on VAD silence. Press Pause again to stop.
2. Clip-mode — press Scroll Lock, talk, and a small editable panel appears with the cleaned transcript. Press Enter to copy the buffer to the clipboard, Shift+Enter to insert a newline, Esc to cancel.

There is no PTT, no wakeword, no always-on listening. Capture starts when you press a key and stops when the session ends.

Status

Pre-1.0. The full v1 build (phases 1–13 of the design) is functional; this is the docs phase. Use it, but expect rough edges and please file issues.

Why

Speech-to-text is one of the few accessibility tools where Linux still has gaps. Existing options either depend on commercial cloud APIs, require Python toolchains and GPU model files, or assume X11. dicta is a single static Go binary that:

• Runs anywhere Wayland and PipeWire run.
• Talks to any Wyoming-protocol ASR server (faster-whisper et al.) by default — no model download in v1.
• Optionally talks to a local whisper-server (subprocess-managed), or any OpenAI-compatible transcription endpoint.
• Optionally cleans transcripts with any OpenAI-compatible LLM (llama.cpp's server, vLLM, OpenAI itself).

Architecture in one diagram

   ┌──────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐    ┌────────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐
   │   Pause /    │ →  │    dictad    │ →  │   asrclient    │ →  │  Wyoming /   │
   │ Scroll Lock  │    │              │    │  (Go module)   │    │  whispercpp/ │
   │ (compositor) │    │  audio + VAD │ ←  │                │ ←  │    OpenAI    │
   └──────────────┘    │  state mach. │    └────────────────┘    └──────────────┘
                       │  control sock│
                       │              │    ┌──────────────┐
                       │              │ →  │   ydotool    │  (type-mode)
                       │              │    └──────────────┘
                       │              │    ┌──────────────┐    ┌──────────────┐
                       │              │ ↔  │ dicta-preview│ →  │   wl-copy    │  (clip-mode)
                       │              │    │   (Gio UI)   │    └──────────────┘
                       └──────────────┘    └──────────────┘

dictad is the daemon (long-lived). dicta is a thin CLI that talks to the daemon over a Unix socket. dicta-preview is the clip-mode panel, spawned on demand. ydotoold and the ASR backend are external.

Quick start

1. Install build deps

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo ./scripts/install-deps-ubuntu.sh

# Fedora
sudo ./scripts/install-deps-fedora.sh

# Arch
sudo ./scripts/install-deps-arch.sh

These install: Go 1.24+, the Gio system libraries (Wayland, xkbcommon, GLES, EGL, libvulkan, libXcursor) for the preview panel, ydotool, and wl-clipboard.

2. Build everything

task build:all

Produces bin/dictad, bin/dicta, and bin/dicta-preview.

3. Install into your home directory

task install:user

Installs to ~/.local/bin and drops the systemd user unit into ~/.config/systemd/user/.

4. Bring up an ASR backend

The default backend is Wyoming. You can run any Wyoming-compatible service — most users want wyoming-faster-whisper. A common setup is its Docker image listening on tcp://localhost:10300.

Other backends:

• --asr-backend whispercpp — dicta supervises a local whisper-server subprocess. Requires you to install whisper.cpp/whisper-server and a model.
• --asr-backend openai — point at any OpenAI-compatible /v1/audio/transcriptions endpoint. Requires an API key.

See CONFIGURATION.md for every flag.

5. Configure flags

systemctl --user edit dictad.service

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=%h/.local/bin/dictad \
    --asr-backend wyoming \
    --asr-wyoming-addr tcp://localhost:10300 \
    --preview-binary %h/.local/bin/dicta-preview

6. Enable and start

systemctl --user enable --now dictad.service
journalctl --user -u dictad.service -f

7. Bind compositor shortcuts

Key	What it does	Command
Pause	Toggle type-mode session	dicta toggle_talk --mode type
Scroll Lock	Toggle clip-mode panel	dicta toggle_talk --mode clip

For GNOME, bind these via gsettings (the Settings GUI tries to nudge you toward chord shortcuts; bypassing it lets you use unmodified single keys). For Sway/Hyprland/KDE, bind in the compositor config.

Optional: LLM cleanup

Off by default. To enable in clip-mode (the preview panel will display cleaned text the user can still edit before pressing Enter):

ExecStart=%h/.local/bin/dictad \
    ... \
    --cleanup-enabled \
    --cleanup-endpoint http://my-llama-server.lan:8080/v1 \
    --cleanup-model qwen3-7b-instruct

The mechanical system prompt is a code constant (cannot be templated by user input). Cleanup is only invoked in clip-mode; type-mode always sends the raw transcript to ydotool.

Optional: audit log (debug mode)

Off by default. JSONL transcripts (and optionally WAV captures) under $XDG_DATA_HOME/dicta/YYYY-MM-DD/:

ExecStart=%h/.local/bin/dictad \
    ... \
    --audit-enabled \
    --audit-keep-audio \
    --audit-retention-days 7

Both --audit-enabled and --audit-keep-audio are required to capture audio. Both default off because both are sensitive by definition.

Hotkey philosophy

v1 ships exactly two compositor bindings (D17 in the design doc): Pause for type-mode, Scroll Lock for clip-mode. There is no global commit or cancel hotkey — clip-mode commits via panel-local Enter and type-mode commits per-utterance via VAD silence. PTT (push-to-talk) and wakeword are out of scope for v1 and are tracked in §14 of the design doc.

Documentation

• dicta-design.md — the design spec (v0.2). Read this before opening a non-trivial PR.
• CONFIGURATION.md — every flag.
• SECURITY.md — security model and the code paths that enforce it.
• packaging/systemd/README.md — systemd unit install and override patterns.

Building from source (no Taskfile)

# Daemon + CLI (pure Go, static)
CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -o bin/dictad ./cmd/dictad
CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -o bin/dicta ./cmd/dicta

# Preview panel (CGo, Wayland)
go build -tags nox11 -o bin/dicta-preview ./cmd/dicta-preview

The daemon and CLI MUST build with CGO_ENABLED=0 (D13). The MemoryDenyWriteExecute=true flag in the systemd unit relies on this.

Testing

task test       # unit tests
task test:race  # with race detector + goleak
task vet        # go vet
task check      # all of the above

internal/control ships a fuzz target for the wire-protocol parser:

go test -fuzz=FuzzCommandUnmarshal -fuzztime=1m ./internal/control

Contributing

The design doc's §13 lists the open decision points; everything else is locked. If you want to change a locked decision, file an issue explaining why before writing code — these were deliberate.

Bugs, typos, packaging contributions: PRs welcome.

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.