meow, world

Hi, I’m Jude, the solo dev behind nui.cat. Here’s what it is and why I made it.

nui.cat is a speech-to-text daemon (an invisible background process) for Linux. It makes it possible for you to talk and dictate text into any app where your text cursor is. It’s basically a Whispr Flow or SuperWhisper alternative for Linux-based computers.

Why I made nui.cat

Voice is easy, fast, and makes computers accessible. But not on Linux apparently. The truth is that corpos treat Linux like second-class citizens when it comes to app support. I personally use Linux for both work and personal use (Pop!_OS, Omarchy). nui.cat was born because I could not find a satisfying speech-to-text app on my machines. Some cool open source projects exist but they are very often heavy Electron wrappers, complicated, and don’t support many distributions and/or desktop environments.

How I made it

I wanted the app to feel native, have macOS simplicity, and be accessible. I chose to make it multilingual, use Vulkan for GPU acceleration, and Rust for a lightweight, safe, native-feeling app.

I aim to make the user experience easy, fast, and private. I routinely question every single part of the app and remove everything that is not holding up to the design intent. It’s not perfect, but I have aligned the app with what I had in mind: “Making speech-to-text accessible for everyone in one click on Linux.”

Compatibility

It’s hard to say without users testing outside my own machines and VMs, but we should support 90% of user distro and DE combinations without any hard dependency. It supports Wayland GNOME, KDE, COSMIC, Hyprland, Sway, and X11.

What’s next

Make nui.cat smarter and more personalized with personal dictionnary. Porting to more OS when (macOS, Windows) when ready. Talking to actual users and learning how people actually use speech-to-text on a daily basis. Make it a delight to use voice-to-text for work and personal use while making it even faster and more accessible.

-Jude