Steno

Welcome to Steno, an open-source dictation tool for Linux. With this tool you can talk to your computer and it will type in what you said in any application you're working with.

Introduction

Why this application exists

I made this application because I find that typing gets harder every day for me. After doing research I found that there were great tools for Windows and Mac, but not for Linux. So I decided to roll my own.

Goals for this application

• Provide a dictation interface for Linux computers that supports a wide range of applications e.g. terminals, web browsers, text editors, and desktop applications.

• Provide a better balance between typing and talking, so you have to use your keyboard less to work with the computer focusing on talking to the computer to input larger bodies of text rather than typing them.

Non-goals for this application

• This application is not meant to control the full user interface of the computer. You'll have to look for other solutions or use this application as inspiration.

How this application is built

I use a fully agentic process to engineer this application. My focus is on the harness engineering and making sure the architecture and functional specs are correct. The coding itself is done via Qwen 3.8 on a Spark DGX. You can learn more in the engineering docs.

System requirements

First, and foremost, use Linux. This tool doesn't work on Windows. Other than that, you need the following tools:

• Node - for the commitlint package
• Rust - the main programming language
• Lefthook - for the pre-commit hooks
• Oh-my-pi - the agent used to write the code
• OpenSpec - used for the spec-driven workflow

If you need help running Qwen 3.8 Flash on a DGX machine, have a look at this awesome repository by Hassan Basbunar.

Getting started

Build the release binary and run the installer from a graphical (systemd) user session:

cargo build --release -p steno-daemon   # or: scripts/install.sh --build
scripts/install.sh

The installer places the daemon at ~/.local/bin/stenod, enables and starts the stenod systemd user service (auto-starts on login, restarts on failure), and — asking for sudo once — installs the udev rule that grants the uinput group access to /dev/uinput. If your user was just added to the uinput group, log out and back in before the daemon can inject text.

The service expects CUDA runtime libraries at ~/.local/lib/steno-cuda. If yours live elsewhere, override the path with a drop-in instead of editing the unit:

systemctl --user edit stenod   # add e.g. Environment=LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/your/path

Check on the service with systemctl --user status stenod and view logs with journalctl --user -u stenod.

Documentation

• Architecture
• Engineering
• Specs