I Added Voice-to-Text to Noctalia Shell So I Can Stop Typing

It was a Wednesday afternoon. I was writing documentation for one of my projects and my hands were getting tired. Not from the code — from the prose. Paragraph after paragraph of explaining things in plain English while my fingers begged for mercy. I thought: why am I still typing all of this? I have a microphone. I have a Wayland compositor. I have a shell that I built myself. And yet, every time I wanted to dictate text, I’d have to open a browser, go to some cloud service, copy the text, paste it back. Or install some Electron app that eats 400 MB of RAM just to sit in the background and do nothing. ...

May 29, 2026 · 10 min read · enrell