Voice Input

The voice extension supports three transcription modes tried in order: voxtype, transcribe, and voxtral-mini-latest, using the first one that's available.

To remove modes or change their priority, override with the LLMS_VOICE environment variable, e.g:

export LLMS_VOICE="transcribe,voxtral-mini-latest"

Usage

🎤 Microphone Button

Click the microphone icon in the chat input area to start recording. Click again to stop and transcribe.

If the voice extension is enabled the microphone button will appear in the chat input area, and the ALT+D keyboard shortcut will be available for voice input.

Keyboard Shortcut

Alt+D toggles voice recording with two modes:

• Tap (< 500ms): Toggle mode - starts recording, press again to stop
• Hold (≥ 500ms): Push-to-talk - records while held, stops when released

The transcribed text is appended to the current message input.

Voice input can be disabled by disabling the voice extension or by setting LLMS_VOICE="" to disable all modes.

Available Modes

Voice Input will use the first available mode.

voxtype

Uses the voxtype.io CLI tool for local transcription.

Requirements:

• voxtype must be installed and on your $PATH
• ffmpeg must be installed for audio format conversion

Installation

Voxtype works on GNOME, KDE, Sway, Hyprland, River—Wayland or X11 with native packages for Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and support for macOS via their source builds.

transcribe

Use your preferred speech-to-text tool by creating a custom transcribe script or executable.

Requirements:

• A transcribe executable on your $PATH that accepts an audio wav file and outputs text to stdout
• ffmpeg must be installed for audio format conversion

Interface:

transcribe recording.wav > transcript.txt

See Creating a transcribe Script for implementation examples.

voxtral-mini-latest

Uses Mistral's Voxtral model for cloud-based transcription. A good option if you want to avoid downloading a large model and using local CPU resources.

Requirements:

• Mistral provider must be enabled in your configuration
• MISTRAL_API_KEY environment variable must be set

Pricing: ~$0.003/minute

Creating a transcribe Script

Make the script executable and add it to your $PATH:

chmod +x ./transcribe
sudo ln -s $(pwd)/transcribe /usr/local/bin/transcribe

Using OpenAI Whisper

Create a script using uvx and openai-whisper:

./transcribe

#!/usr/bin/env bash
uvx --from openai-whisper whisper "$1" --model base.en --output_format txt --output_dir /tmp >/dev/null 2>&1

BASENAME=$(basename "${1%.*}")
cat "/tmp/${BASENAME}.txt"
rm -f "/tmp/${BASENAME}.txt"

Using Whisper.cpp

whisper.cpp provides a faster, dependency-free C++ implementation.

Setup:

git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp.git
cd whisper.cpp

# Download a model
sh ./models/download-ggml-model.sh base.en

# Build
cmake -B build
cmake --build build -j --config Release

# Test
./build/bin/whisper-cli -f samples/jfk.wav

Create the transcribe script:

./transcribe

#!/usr/bin/env bash
SCRIPT_DIR="$(cd "$(dirname "$(readlink -f "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")")" && pwd)"
MODEL="$SCRIPT_DIR/models/ggml-base.en.bin"
CLI="$SCRIPT_DIR/build/bin/whisper-cli"
TMPFILE=$(mktemp /tmp/whisper-XXXXXX)

trap 'rm -f "$TMPFILE" "${TMPFILE}.txt"' EXIT

"$CLI" -m "$MODEL" -otxt -f "$1" -of "$TMPFILE" >/dev/null 2>&1

cat "${TMPFILE}.txt"