@NatalyaD @xanna @kittyboy77

I'm using Talon for speech to text on Linux now.

It can do a ton of other voice-control stuff too, potentially in conjunction with an eye tracker or pedals, so you don't necessarily need to use your hands whatsoever. In using it purely for dictation, I'm only really scratching the surface of its capabilities.

You have to be at least a little bit techie to get it up and running, and you pretty much have to be on the Slack if you need any help. I wouldn't be surprised if the documentation improved in future - it's early days yet and the developer is clearly working hard on the software itself. Meanwhile he does answer questions impressively fast on the Slack, as do some power users.

(There _is_ a fair amount of documentation already, inc for abundant customisation options - but it's not at all beginner-level. My heart sinks at the amount of background reading I'd need to do to understand it! So I've done very little customising so far.)

The speech model is imported, and unlike Dragon, it doesn't try to train itself from you correcting your text: it only changes interpretation via being explicitly told stuff, to the effect of e.g. "this name exists" or "what you've been guessing as bleep should be blorp". After about a month of adding new correction-instructions to it, and me getting used to it, I was finding it reasonably comparable to Dragon in terms of dictation accuracy.

I actually kind of prefer Talon to Dragon now, because my Dragon would crash a lot, which outweighed some of its bells and whistles, and Talon's been really stable. And I like the clarity of the correction-instructions (even if they don't _always_ catch what I meant) versus the trying to "train" Dragon on things it might or might not learn to get.

Talon's not compatible with Wayland, and, I gather, won't ever be, because Wayland intrinsically doesn't support the way it works. So you need a Linux distro which can do the older one, ISTR it's called X or X-something. As I understand it, this factor could be a question-mark over Talon's long-term future on Linux, depending on how long the older one remains supported (or substitutable). Can't forecast that aspect because I don't fully understand the relevant Linux landscape.

I'm still on the free version of Talon, and there's a paid beta with more things and integrations, including being able to teach it a variety of pops and clicks and suchlike!

HTH

#Talon