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Hold a key, speak, and the words are typed

Browse Source 
Super+D holds the microphone open, releasing it transcribes on the GPU and
types the result wherever the cursor is. Roughly 150ms for a normal utterance
once the model is resident, measured rather than hoped for.

Getting there meant discarding two approaches. Fedora 44 cannot install any
GPU-capable Whisper for Python -- openai-whisper needs a numba that needs an
llvmlite that does not exist for 3.14, and faster-whisper needs a ctranslate2
nobody packaged. The whisper-cpp package IS built with HIP but ships libraries
with no binary and no bindings, and hand-writing ctypes for a large by-value
struct is a segfault waiting for a version bump. So a container, as suggested.

Vulkan rather than ROCm, and upstream's image rather than one built here. ROCm
is seven gigabytes and serves AMD alone; Vulkan compute runs on the AMD, Intel
and NVIDIA machines this config is used on, in a twentieth of the space. The
Vulkan tag already contains whisper-server, so there is no Containerfile to keep
working -- an earlier draft of this commit had one, and it was strictly worse.

Two bugs found by using it rather than by reading it. Whisper describes silence
as the literal text "[BLANK_AUDIO]", and the first working version pasted that
string into the clipboard; a transcription that is nothing but such markers is
now discarded. And the server answers with a line per segment, which typed into
a window is an Enter press -- sending the half-written message, submitting the
form. Whitespace is collapsed to one line.

Neither the image nor the model is installed by ./install. Together they are
over two gigabytes that want the network, and Settings offers both as one
action instead. Nothing starts at login either: whisper-server holds the model
from the moment it starts, so the first press of the key is what brings it up.

The contract pins both text bugs, that the server stays on loopback, and that it
does not start at login. Reverting the [BLANK_AUDIO] guard did not fail it at
first -- the check was still correct, it had simply stopped being called -- so
it now checks the call site too.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q84axqUE5inJhf5Jz9CFy1
This commit is contained in:
Gabriel Brown
2026-08-21 12:22:19 -04:00
parent b280bd02d7
commit 7cd4131327
9 changed files with 887 additions and 1 deletions
Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files
config/dot/quickshell/scripts/panama-dictate
Executable
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#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""Dictation: hold a key, speak, and the words are typed where you were typing.
panama-dictate start begin recording (bound to key press)
panama-dictate stop stop, transcribe, and type the result
panama-dictate cancel stop and discard
panama-dictate status JSON: model, server, and image
panama-dictate setup fetch the image and the model, with progress
There is no daemon here, and that is the point. Transcription is done by
whisper.cpp running in a container -- see config/containers/whisper -- which
holds the model on the GPU between utterances. This script only records, asks
that server for the text, and types it, so `start` and `stop` are two short
runs of a script rather than two messages to something long-lived. What they
share is a pidfile.
Neither the image nor the model ships with Panama, and neither is fetched during
installation. Together they are more than two gigabytes, and an installer that
quietly spends ten minutes on them is the surprise the interview exists to
prevent. Settings offers both as one action; until then, dictation says what is
missing rather than hanging.
The image is upstream's own Vulkan build of whisper.cpp -- Vulkan so that one
image serves the AMD, Intel and NVIDIA machines this config runs on, where a
ROCm build would serve only the AMD ones at twenty times the size.
"""
from __future__ import annotations
import json
import os
import re
import shutil
import signal
import subprocess
import sys
import tempfile
import time
import urllib.error
import urllib.request
from pathlib import Path
MODEL = "small"
MODEL_DIR = Path(os.environ.get("XDG_DATA_HOME", Path.home() / ".local/share")) / "panama/whisper"
MODEL_FILE = MODEL_DIR / f"ggml-{MODEL}.bin"
MODEL_URL = f"https://huggingface.co/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/resolve/main/ggml-{MODEL}.bin"
IMAGE = "ghcr.io/ggml-org/whisper.cpp:main-vulkan"
SERVICE = "panama-whisper.service"
ENDPOINT = "http://127.0.0.1:8791/inference"
RUNTIME_DIR = Path(os.environ.get("XDG_RUNTIME_DIR", f"/run/user/{os.getuid()}"))
STATE_FILE = RUNTIME_DIR / "panama-dictate.json"
# 16 kHz mono is what Whisper resamples to anyway, so recording it directly
# avoids a conversion and keeps the file small.
SAMPLE_RATE = "16000"
# Anything shorter is a key tapped by accident rather than something said.
# Transcribing a fifth of a second of room tone reliably invents a word, and
# that word then gets typed.
MIN_SECONDS = 0.35
REASONS = {
"not-downloaded": "Speech model not downloaded — see Settings",
"no-image": "Speech server not installed — see Settings",
"server-unavailable": "The speech server did not answer",
"transcribe-failed": "Transcription failed",
"too-short": "Too short",
"no-speech": "Nothing was said",
"not-recording": "Not recording",
"already-recording": "Already listening",
"deliver-failed": "Could not deliver the text",
}
def osd(message: str | None) -> None:
"""Show a line on the on-screen display, or clear it.
Never fatal: the shell can be restarting, and dictation that refused to work
because it could not draw a label would be worse than a silent one.
"""
argv = (["qs", "ipc", "call", "osd", "hide"] if message is None
else ["qs", "ipc", "call", "osd", "message", "microphone", message])
try:
subprocess.run(argv, capture_output=True, timeout=3, check=False)
except (OSError, subprocess.SubprocessError):
pass
def emit(result: dict) -> int:
print(json.dumps(result))
return 0 if result.get("ok") else 2
def have_image() -> bool:
try:
done = subprocess.run(["podman", "image", "exists", IMAGE],
capture_output=True, timeout=15, check=False)
return done.returncode == 0
except (OSError, subprocess.SubprocessError):
return False
def server_ready(timeout: float = 1.5) -> bool:
try:
request = urllib.request.Request(ENDPOINT, method="OPTIONS")
urllib.request.urlopen(request, timeout=timeout)
return True
except urllib.error.HTTPError:
# Answering at all is what is being asked. A 404 or 405 to OPTIONS still
# means something is listening and loaded.
return True
except (urllib.error.URLError, OSError):
return False
def start_server() -> bool:
"""Bring the container up and wait for the model to load.
Started here rather than at login: whisper-server holds the model from the
moment it starts, and a session where nobody dictates should not be paying
half a gigabyte of VRAM for the possibility.
"""
if server_ready():
return True
try:
subprocess.run(["systemctl", "--user", "start", SERVICE],
capture_output=True, timeout=30, check=False)
except (OSError, subprocess.SubprocessError):
return False
# The first start loads the model, which takes seconds rather than
# milliseconds. Recording is already running by then, so this wait costs
# nothing that was going to be spoken.
deadline = time.monotonic() + 120
while time.monotonic() < deadline:
if server_ready():
return True
time.sleep(0.25)
return False
def deliver(text: str) -> str:
"""Get text into the focused window. Returns how it got there.
Typing is preferred: it lands wherever the cursor is, works in terminals and
editors that ignore a paste, and leaves the clipboard alone -- which matters
here, because Panama keeps clipboard history and dictation would otherwise
fill it with everything ever said.
The clipboard is the fallback rather than the default, for the applications
that refuse synthetic keystrokes. Which one happened is reported back, so
the caller can say so: a fallback nobody is told about is how "it typed
nothing" becomes a mystery.
"""
if shutil.which("wtype"):
try:
done = subprocess.run(["wtype", "--", text],
capture_output=True, timeout=60, check=False)
if done.returncode == 0:
return "typed"
except (OSError, subprocess.SubprocessError):
pass
if shutil.which("wl-copy"):
try:
subprocess.run(["wl-copy", "--", text],
capture_output=True, timeout=10, check=False)
return "copied"
except (OSError, subprocess.SubprocessError):
pass
return "failed"
def transcribe(path: Path) -> tuple[str | None, str | None]:
"""Ask the container for the text. Returns (text, error)."""
boundary = "----panama-dictate"
body = b"".join([
f'--{boundary}\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="file"; '
f'filename="speech.wav"\r\nContent-Type: audio/wav\r\n\r\n'.encode(),
path.read_bytes(),
f'\r\n--{boundary}\r\nContent-Disposition: form-data; name="response_format"'
f'\r\n\r\ntext\r\n--{boundary}--\r\n'.encode(),
])
request = urllib.request.Request(
ENDPOINT, data=body, method="POST",
headers={"Content-Type": f"multipart/form-data; boundary={boundary}"})
try:
with urllib.request.urlopen(request, timeout=300) as response:
answer = response.read().decode(errors="replace").strip()
except (urllib.error.URLError, OSError, urllib.error.HTTPError):
return None, "transcribe-failed"
# response_format=text is asked for, but a server built from a different
# upstream revision may answer JSON regardless. Reading both costs three
# lines and saves a version bump turning dictation into gibberish.
if answer.startswith("{"):
try:
answer = str(json.loads(answer).get("text", "")).strip()
except (json.JSONDecodeError, AttributeError):
return None, "transcribe-failed"
# One line, always. The server returns a line per segment, and a newline
# typed into a window is an Enter press -- which sends the half-finished
# message, submits the form, or runs the command. Whitespace is collapsed
# rather than only stripped, because the break is in the middle of the
# sentence, not at its ends.
return " ".join(answer.split()), None
# Whisper describes what it heard when it did not hear words: [BLANK_AUDIO] for
# silence, and things like (wind blowing) or [MUSIC] for sound that is not
# speech. They arrive as ordinary text, so without this they get typed -- the
# first test of this dictated the literal string "[BLANK_AUDIO]" into the
# clipboard, which is precisely the kind of thing nobody notices until it lands
# in the middle of a commit message.
NON_SPEECH = re.compile(r"[\[(][^\])]*[\])]")
def is_speech(text: str) -> bool:
"""False when the transcription is only Whisper describing the absence of speech.
Deliberately conservative: bracketed groups are removed and what remains is
what decides. A sentence that merely contains an aside keeps its brackets and
is still typed in full -- only a transcription that is nothing BUT markers is
discarded, because throwing away real words would be far worse than typing a
stray marker.
"""
return NON_SPEECH.sub("", text).strip() != ""
def read_state() -> dict | None:
try:
return json.loads(STATE_FILE.read_text())
except (OSError, json.JSONDecodeError):
return None
def handle_start() -> dict:
if not MODEL_FILE.exists():
osd(REASONS["not-downloaded"])
return {"ok": False, "error": "not-downloaded"}
if not have_image():
osd(REASONS["no-image"])
return {"ok": False, "error": "no-image"}
existing = read_state()
if existing is not None:
# A stale pidfile from a crash should not block dictation forever, so
# it is only respected while the process it names is actually alive.
try:
os.kill(existing["pid"], 0)
return {"ok": False, "error": "already-recording"}
except (OSError, KeyError, TypeError):
STATE_FILE.unlink(missing_ok=True)
MODEL_DIR.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
handle, name = tempfile.mkstemp(prefix="panama-dictate-", suffix=".wav")
os.close(handle)
# pw-record rather than a library: pipewire-utils is already installed --
# it backs the privacy indicators and the sound test -- and it records from
# whatever WirePlumber calls the default source, so changing input device
# in Settings changes what dictation hears, with no code here.
recorder = subprocess.Popen(
["pw-record", "--rate", SAMPLE_RATE, "--channels", "1", "--format", "s16", name],
stdout=subprocess.DEVNULL, stderr=subprocess.DEVNULL, start_new_session=True)
STATE_FILE.write_text(json.dumps({
"pid": recorder.pid, "path": name, "startedAt": time.time()}))
STATE_FILE.chmod(0o600)
osd("Listening…")
return {"ok": True, "recording": True}
def finish_recording() -> tuple[Path | None, float]:
"""Stop the recorder and hand back its file and how long it ran."""
state = read_state()
STATE_FILE.unlink(missing_ok=True)
if state is None:
return None, 0.0
path = Path(state.get("path", ""))
elapsed = max(0.0, time.time() - float(state.get("startedAt", time.time())))
try:
# SIGINT rather than SIGKILL: pw-record finalises the WAV header when
# interrupted, and a file whose header still claims zero length is one
# the server reads as silence.
os.kill(int(state["pid"]), signal.SIGINT)
except (OSError, KeyError, TypeError, ValueError):
return (path if path.exists() else None), elapsed
deadline = time.monotonic() + 5
while time.monotonic() < deadline:
try:
os.kill(int(state["pid"]), 0)
except OSError:
break
time.sleep(0.05)
return (path if path.exists() else None), elapsed
def handle_stop() -> dict:
path, elapsed = finish_recording()
if path is None:
osd(None)
return {"ok": False, "error": "not-recording"}
try:
if elapsed < MIN_SECONDS:
osd(REASONS["too-short"])
return {"ok": False, "error": "too-short"}
osd("Transcribing…")
if not start_server():
osd(REASONS["server-unavailable"])
return {"ok": False, "error": "server-unavailable"}
text, error = transcribe(path)
if error is not None:
osd(REASONS[error])
return {"ok": False, "error": error}
if not text or not is_speech(text):
osd(REASONS["no-speech"])
return {"ok": False, "error": "no-speech"}
how = deliver(text)
if how == "failed":
osd(REASONS["deliver-failed"])
return {"ok": False, "error": "deliver-failed", "text": text}
# Announced only when it did NOT go where it was meant to. A successful
# dictation needs no notification: the words are already on screen.
osd("Pasted — press Ctrl+V" if how == "copied" else None)
return {"ok": True, "delivered": how, "characters": len(text)}
finally:
path.unlink(missing_ok=True)
def handle_cancel() -> dict:
path, _ = finish_recording()
if path is not None:
path.unlink(missing_ok=True)
osd(None)
return {"ok": True, "cancelled": True}
def handle_status() -> dict:
state = read_state()
return {
"ok": True,
"model": MODEL,
"modelInstalled": MODEL_FILE.exists(),
"modelPath": str(MODEL_FILE),
"modelBytes": MODEL_FILE.stat().st_size if MODEL_FILE.exists() else 0,
"imageBuilt": have_image(),
"serverReady": server_ready(),
"recording": state is not None,
"typingAvailable": shutil.which("wtype") is not None,
}
def pull_image() -> bool:
"""Fetch the speech server image. Progress is podman's own, on stderr."""
if have_image():
return True
print(json.dumps({"ok": True, "state": "pulling", "image": IMAGE}), flush=True)
try:
done = subprocess.run(["podman", "pull", IMAGE],
capture_output=True, timeout=3600, check=False)
return done.returncode == 0
except (OSError, subprocess.SubprocessError):
return False
def download_model() -> bool:
MODEL_DIR.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
if MODEL_FILE.exists():
return True
# Written beside the target and moved into place, so an interrupted download
# never leaves a file that looks like a model. Half a model is worse than
# none: everything downstream believes it is there and fails at load.
partial = MODEL_FILE.with_suffix(".partial")
print(json.dumps({"ok": True, "state": "downloading", "model": MODEL}), flush=True)
try:
with urllib.request.urlopen(MODEL_URL, timeout=60) as response:
total = int(response.headers.get("content-length", 0))
done = 0
last = 0.0
with partial.open("wb") as handle:
while True:
chunk = response.read(1 << 20)
if not chunk:
break
handle.write(chunk)
done += len(chunk)
now = time.monotonic()
# Once a second, not once a megabyte: five hundred progress
# lines is not progress, it is a flood.
if total and now - last >= 1.0:
last = now
print(json.dumps({"ok": True, "state": "downloading",
"bytes": done, "total": total}), flush=True)
except (urllib.error.URLError, OSError):
partial.unlink(missing_ok=True)
return False
partial.replace(MODEL_FILE)
return True
def handle_setup() -> int:
"""Everything dictation needs that Panama does not install.
The image first: a model is useless without something to run it, and being
told to fetch half a gigabyte before hearing that an image is also needed
would be two trips.
"""
if not shutil.which("podman"):
print(json.dumps({"ok": False, "error": "no-podman"}), flush=True)
return 2
if not pull_image():
print(json.dumps({"ok": False, "error": "pull-failed"}), flush=True)
return 2
if not download_model():
print(json.dumps({"ok": False, "error": "download-failed"}), flush=True)
return 2
print(json.dumps({"ok": True, "state": "ready",
"bytes": MODEL_FILE.stat().st_size}), flush=True)
return 0
HANDLERS = {
"start": handle_start,
"stop": handle_stop,
"cancel": handle_cancel,
"status": handle_status,
}
def main(argv: list[str]) -> int:
command = argv[0] if argv else "status"
if command == "setup":
return handle_setup()
handler = HANDLERS.get(command)
if handler is None:
return emit({"ok": False, "error": "unknown-command"})
return emit(handler())
if __name__ == "__main__":
raise SystemExit(main(sys.argv[1:]))