I got tired of paying for Wispr Flow, so I built a free voice-typing daemon for Linux
I use Linux Mint XFCE as my daily driver and got jealous of all the Wispr Flow demos floating around. It's macOS/Windows-first and subscription-based, so instead of switching OS I spent a few weekends building the thing myself.
It's called AutoType. The whole interaction is: double-tap Right Alt anywhere, talk, double-tap again. A little floating pill shows a waveform so you know it's listening, then the cleaned-up text gets pasted into whatever window has focus.
The part I care most about is that it isn't locked to one vendor:
- Speech-to-text: cloud (Deepgram, Whisper via OpenAI or Groq, NVIDIA NIM) or 100% local offline with Parakeet GGUF models
- Text cleanup: OpenAI, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, Groq, OpenRouter, NVIDIA NIM, Ollama, or any custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint
- f you run Local STT + Ollama, nothing leaves your machine at all
Before the LLM touches anything, there's a deterministic normalization pass that handles spoken punctuation ("comma", "open quote"), "new line", bullet points, and personal vocab casing — so it doesn't hallucinate your formatting away. Then the LLM strips the "um"s and "uh"s and matches tone to your active window (more casual in Slack, code-formatted in an IDE).
A few details I'm weirdly proud of:
- t backs up and restores your clipboard instead of clobbering it
- The LLM layer is skipped entirely in raw mode or for voice commands
- GUI settings app, so you don't have to hand-edit .env
Free, MIT, no account, no telemetry. Costs are whatever your own API provider charges — usually fractions of a cent per dictation — or literally zero if you go fully local.
Repo: https://github.com/premtechworks/AutoType-Linux
Fair warning: it's built and tested on Linux Mint XFCE + X11. It leans on xdotool for window detection and pasting, so Wayland folks will probably have a rough time right now — that's the top thing on my list. Would love feedback, especially from anyone who tries the fully-offline path.