Ever wished you could talk in to a text field rather than type? Ubuntu 26.10 hears you – quite literally. Canonical’s VP of Engineer Jon Seager, at the Ubuntu Summit, said the distro will soon lets users “press a button and talk into any field that you could previously type in”. A small, on-device AI language parsing model like Whisper will power the feature. It’s part of a wider push to integrate AI features in Ubuntu this year, with founder Mark Shuttleworth aiming to position Ubuntu as the ‘OS for agentic AI’. AI features in Ubuntu will be shipped as […]

You're reading Ubuntu is adding AI-powered voice input to all text fields, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Your mouth can (probably) say things quicker than your hands can type them, yet voice typing is rarely used as a primary input method on desktop, despite most of us thinking nothing of using it on mobile. That’s despite speech-to-text being available on desktop OSes for decades, natively and through dedicated apps. It never caught on because it was inaccurate and slow and typically hidden away as an assistive feature. (And because a lot of what you do at a keyboard is navigation and that is less efficient to speak, unless ‘arrow down, arrow down, arrow down’ is some trendy […]

You're reading Type with your voice on Linux using this Whisper-based app, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.