Hold a key, speak,
text appears.

Why this exists

sensor is a simple, reliable, and lightweight dictation solution for Linux. It is a free alternative to tools like WhisprFlow. It works on GNOME Wayland, KDE, X11, and a bare tty. Privacy is guaranteed because the transcription happens entirely on your machine.

One command and you're done. No git clone, no Python environment, no a long list of manual sudo commands just for installation.

If you regret it, one command and it's gone.

sensor is the same transcription everyone else uses, packaged like software you'd actually install.

What you get

How it works

A small daemon runs as you — never as root — and keeps a speech model loaded in memory. Holding the hotkey starts recording; releasing it hands the audio straight to the model and puts the result into the window you're already typing in.

Keeping the model warm is the whole reason it's a daemon rather than a script. Loading it per utterance is what makes every other project feel slow.

Installing

Ubuntu 24.04 and Debian, x86-64 · Read the script first · or download the .deb

The script does not install anything itself. It checks your architecture, downloads the .deb from GitHub Releases, verifies it's a real package, and hands it to apt. Apt does the installing, which is exactly what lets apt undo it later.

Then log out and back in once. That's unavoidable: group membership only reaches a session at login, and sensor needs to be in input and uinput to see your hotkey and type for you.

First launch downloads the speech model (~75MB) once. After that, nothing touches the network again.

Removing it

Removes the binaries, the udev rule, the systemd unit, the model, your settings, and the group memberships the installer added. Nothing is left behind.

Then everything will be gone.

I hate software that leaves a mess behind. sensor is not that.

Watch it work

The basics

Hold Right Alt + ., speak, release.

This is the default hotkey. You can pick from other preset options or set your own hotkey with the terminal command sensorctl keys.

The text goes into whatever window has focus. A browser, an editor, a chat box, a terminal. They should all work.

The settings window

Open sensor from your applications. Everything is in one small window: the on/off switch and what state the daemon is in, your hotkey, your microphone, the model in use, and the last few things it heard.

Those recent transcriptions live in memory only. Nothing is written into your disk ever.

From the terminal

• sensorctl setup — download the model, enable the daemon
• sensorctl keys — bind any key or chord by pressing it
• sensorctl config — show your settings and where they live
• sensorctl doctor — check what's working and what isn't

sensorctl keys exists because no hotkey is safe on every keyboard. Laptops fold the function row into an Fn layer, and 2024+ models replaced right Ctrl with a Copilot key. Pressing the key you want is more reliable than guessing its name.

Good to know

• English only for now — it ships with tiny.en.
• Terminals paste with Ctrl+Shift+V instead of Ctrl+V. Wayland won’t tell an app which window has focus, so sensor can’t switch by itself — set Where you type in the settings window.
• A short tap produces nothing rather than a guessed word. Speak, then release.
• If a paste ever fails, the text is left on your clipboard rather than lost.

What it touches on your system

sensor reads every keystroke and can synthesise keystrokes. That's inherent to any global-hotkey tool on Linux, and you would want to know exactly what it does before you install it.

Why it needs that access

Wayland deliberately forbids applications from reading global keys or injecting keystrokes, and the protocol some tools use for it is refused by GNOME outright. Reading /dev/input and writing /dev/uinput sits below the compositor, which is why it works on GNOME, KDE, X11 and a bare tty alike.

What limits it

Read it yourself

The project is MIT licensed and on GitHub. The parts worth reading first are the packaging scripts — packaging/debian/postinst and postrm — because they're what actually changes your system.