Back to the work
Developer Tools · Builder

Voxt.

A voice-to-text clipboard tool for Linux written in Go: press a global hotkey, speak, and the transcription (via Groq's Whisper) lands on your clipboard, with a system tray, desktop notifications, SQLite history, and Wayland and X11 support.

Role
Builder
When
2026
Stack
Go, PortAudio, Groq Whisper, SQLite
Scale
Go single binary
Voxt previewGo · Whisper · Wayland+X11
Gosingle binary
whisper-large-v3via Groq
Wayland + X11both supported
SQLitelocal history

The problem

Dictation on Linux is fiddly: most tools are cloud apps, browser extensions, or desktop-environment-specific. The aim was a small, fast, keyboard-driven utility that works the same on Wayland and X11, press a hotkey anywhere, speak, and have the text waiting on your clipboard, with no window to focus.

What it does

  1. A Go desktop app split into focused packages, audio capture (PortAudio), a global hotkey listener, transcription, clipboard, desktop notifications, a system tray, and a SQLite history store.
  2. Transcription through Groq's Whisper (whisper-large-v3) for speed, with optional formatting of the result through a Groq-hosted Llama model, and retry with backoff on rate limits.
  3. Press-to-toggle recording on a configurable global hotkey (default F9), with start/stop beeps and a tray icon that reflects the recording state.
  4. Works on both Wayland and X11, stores every transcription in SQLite, and copies the result straight to the clipboard with a desktop notification when it is ready.

Impact

  • Turns dictation into a single keypress: the tool lives in the tray, and the transcribed text is on the clipboard before you switch back to whatever you were typing in.
  • Display-server-agnostic by design, so it behaves the same on a Wayland and an X11 desktop instead of breaking on one of them.
  • A clean small-Go-app layout, each concern (audio, hotkey, transcribe, clipboard, notify, tray, db) is its own package wired together in main.