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# Vocalinux Turns Your Speech Into Text Without Giving Away Voice Data
- URL: https://itsfoss.com/news/vocalinux-beta-release/
- Published: 2026-07-16T16:45:44.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-17T04:53:52.000Z
- Description: The 0.14 beta adds many new upgrades.
- Author: Sourav Rudra
- Tags: News, Local AI

An open source, speech-to-text tool for Linux called [Vocalinux](https://vocalinux.com/?ref=itsfoss.com) has just introduced its [0.14 beta](https://github.com/jatinkrmalik/vocalinux/releases/tag/v0.14.0-beta?ref=itsfoss.com) release, bringing about a mix of refinements that touch keyboard shortcuts, remote transcription, and Wayland reliability.

We kick things off with the most important usability addition. Earlier, users were stuck with the default toggle or push-to-talk bindings for recording audio during transcriptions.

Now, **it is possible to set keyboard shortcuts** via the *Settings* menu, allowing you to create a diverse range of keybind combinations using the *Ctrl*, *Alt*, *Shift*, and *Super* keys paired with any letter or number key.

Likewise, on GNOME's Wayland session, text injection is possible again when a bare [XKB](https://www.x.org/XKB/?ref=itsfoss.com) engine is configured, and whisper.cpp no longer defaults to using every CPU core on hybrid Intel and AMD laptops.

Remote API users get something too, where the Remote API engine **now supports FunASR and SenseVoice models** through OpenAI-compatible endpoints.

## What is Vocalinux?

![](https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2026/07/vocalinux-about-dialog.png)

![](https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2026/07/vocalinux-settings-menu.png)

**The about dialog and settings menu of Vocalinux.*

I talked about the new Vocalinux release, but I never fully explained what it was.

It is **a free and open source voice dictation app for Linux**, released under the **GPL-3.0 license**. It lives in your system tray and lets you dictate into almost any text field on your desktop, terminals, browsers, IDEs, office apps, wherever your cursor happens to be.

And **everything runs locally**, so your voice data stays on your machine the whole time.

The choice of speech recognition engine isn't locked either, as you get [whisper.cpp](https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp?ref=itsfoss.com) as the default choice, followed by [Whisper](https://github.com/openai/whisper?ref=itsfoss.com) for PyTorch and NVIDIA configs, [VOSK](https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api?ref=itsfoss.com) for lightweight setups, and Remote API for offloading to a network server.

**I tried testing this beta release** to see what it offered. I tried running it on two separate distros, Fedora Workstation and Ubuntu; the result for both runs was an app refusing to launch via the app launcher or the terminal.

It eventually did launch on Ubuntu after I followed some [troubleshooting steps](https://vocalinux.com/troubleshooting/?ref=itsfoss.com), but the app was unresponsive and had to be terminated. Even so, I am not too bummed out by this, as such are the risks associated with pre-release software.

## Get started

You can get a quick start by trying out the demo on the [Vocalinux](https://vocalinux.com/?ref=itsfoss.com#demo) website, which runs *SpeechRecognition* on your web browser. Naturally, that's for testing purposes only.

![the vocalinux installer running inside a terminal window on ubuntu](https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2026/07/ubuntu-vocalinux-installer.png)

**If you want to locally run speech-to-text** on your Linux computer, then you can install Vocalinux by running this script:

🚧

Always verify such scripts before running them on your computer.

```
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jatinkrmalik/vocalinux/main/install.sh -o /tmp/vl.sh && bash /tmp/vl.sh --interactive
```

[Vocalinux](https://vocalinux.com/?ref=itsfoss.com#install)

After the installation finishes, either run `vocalinux` or find the app icon in the application launcher. If you get caught up choosing between the engines, there's [a comparo](https://vocalinux.com/compare/?ref=itsfoss.com) that should make your decision easier.

*If you were looking for it, the source code for Vocalinux lives on* [*GitHub*](https://github.com/jatinkrmalik/vocalinux?ref=itsfoss.com)*.*

Also, running the installer on a non-Debian-based distro like Fedora, will make it throw a warning or two about needing to install dependencies manually, take a note of that before proceeding.

My thanks to [Phoronix](https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vocalinux-0.14-Beta?ref=itsfoss.com) for bringing this tool to my attention. 😄