Speech Note: App for Offline Speech to Text, TTS, and Translation

I’ve always dreamed of talking to computers. Cloud tools made it possible, but nothing beats doing it right on your machine. The first one I encountered that ran well locally was Dragon Speak. It worked pretty well but was very expensive and closed.

In recent years, few models can run locally and do well. OpenAI Whisper took it to the next level. However, it wouldn’t run on my LC230. Then there were derivatives like Whisper.CPP, which offered tiny models with modest accuracy even on my LC230. That changed drastically with the arrival of a new laptop that can run medium-sized models with reasonably good accuracy.

So now I run Speech Note (dsnote) all the time. Speech Note is a Linux app that can be used for writing, reading, and translating with offline Speech to Text, Text to Speech, and Machine translation models. It supports hundreds of models you can download and run from the app. It’s an all-in-one app that is packaged well.

Speech to Text

It has many models available (including any of your custom models). Since I run it on a laptop without a dedicated GPU, picking a model always means balancing GPU load, speed, and quality. Here is my table.

Of course, you can download multiple models and choose a specific model at any point.

Text to Speech

Same with TTS, here I have gone with Piper librettr_s models. I like Kathleen’s voice. This is my default. It’s fast, clear and quite pleasant to listen to.

Translation

My translations are mostly from German to English. So many OSM related articles are in German.

Actions

Speech Note (dsnote) also supports calling actions through the command line. So, you configure your OS-level customization, automations and shortcuts. For example, I have Ctrl+Alt+L to start listening.

flatpak run net.mkiol.SpeechNote --action start-listening 

Supported actions

      Invokes an action

      Supported actions (@action_name) are:
       start-listening
       start-listening-translate
       start-listening-active-window
       start-listening-translate-active-window
       start-listening-clipboard
       start-listening-translate-clipboard
       stop-listening
       start-reading
       start-reading-clipboard
       start-reading-text *
       pause-resume-reading
       cancel
       switch-to-next-stt-model
       switch-to-prev-stt-model
       switch-to-next-tts-model
       switch-to-prev-tts-model
       set-stt-model *
       set-tts-model *

      * Optional 'argument' is used to pass model-id or
      text to read. To pass both, set 'argument' to
      "{model-id}text to read".

Settings

Need help

I’m still looking for good FOSS options for Kannada TTS, Indian English STT voices, and English↔Kannada translation models. Send your recommendations my way.