Hey all,
I've been a Linux user for many years now, primarily on full featured GNOME and KDE desktop environments. However, as I've gotten older and developed arthritis in my hands, I've found myself relying more and more on Android for its easy and available voice-to-text keyboard input.
Being able to dictate messages is sometimes the only comfortable way to communicate. I don't want to have to switch over to Mac just to get usable system-wide voice input, but I have been considering it.
So I'm wondering if there have been any improvements on this front in recent Linux distros or GNOME releases? Last I checked a few years ago, the voice recognition and dictation options were still quite limited compared to mobile operating systems or Mac.
Are there any new solutions for Linux voice-to-text that works well across different apps either working now or in development? Have I overlooked any obvious choice?
GPT4ALL sounds like your best bet. It's one of the easiest to set up solutions at the moment. As best as I can tell none of the open and local options are gpt4 level yet. that's it, there are lots of models to play with and they seem to be getting better very quickly. GPT4ALL makes it pretty simple I specifically linking the models that work and helping you download them.
the one downside is that I don't believe they have implemented GPU models yet. that means things are easy to set up, but it's going to be a slow experience, especially if you don't have a really beefy CPU and lots of RAM.