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Best of · facts checked 2026-09-05

The best dictation software for Linux

Linux is the platform most dictation apps skip: Wispr Flow, Typeless, Superwhisper, SuperDictate, Whisperstream and Dragon do not ship for it. Three do: Lven Instant, on-device, unlimited, measured, on X11 and Wayland, and free; Lven Cloud, server-side at $3.49 a month billed yearly; and OpenWhispr, free and open source if you manage Whisper models yourself.

Scored on
  1. Ships for Linux at all
  2. Where the audio is processed
  3. X11 and Wayland support, and how insertion works on each
  4. Package formats and what the distribution must provide
  5. Price and limits
The ranking

  1. Lven Instant

    ClassEve

    The only dictation product compared on this site that is always on-device, never rewrites your words, has no usage cap and ships on Linux — and it is free.

    Right for: Daily dictation on a Linux desktop, offline, as a .deb, .rpm or AppImage.

    Where it transcribes
    On your device — nothing uploaded
    Your words
    Typed as said, punctuated, never rewritten
    Speed and accuracy
    About 6× faster than you speak (RTF 0.166), 3.76% word error rate on clean speech — consumer-grade hardware, 73 clips, measured 2026-07-23.
    Limits
    None
    Platforms
    Windows, Linux, Android
    Price
    Free

  2. Lven Cloud

    ClassEve

    The same bubble with the transcription done on our servers, at a third of Wispr Flow's price: no word cap, no rewrite unless you turn on AI polish, nothing kept after delivery, and nothing heavy on your machine.

    Right for: A Linux machine too small for the local model.

    Where it transcribes
    On ClassEve's servers; audio and text not kept after delivery
    Your words
    Punctuated as said; AI polish only if you turn it on
    Limits
    No daily cap on a paid plan
    Platforms
    Windows, Linux, Android
    Price
    From $3.49/mo billed yearly, $7.99 monthly; included with Premium

  3. OpenWhispr

    Free, MIT-licensed Whisper dictation that runs offline, for people happy to manage models themselves. On the same hardware where Lven Instant's engine runs about six times faster than you speak, whisper-large-v3 never reaches realtime.

    Right for: Free and open source above everything, and comfortable troubleshooting models and configs yourself.

    Where it transcribes
    On-device (Whisper)
    Platforms
    Windows, macOS, Linux (per its site). No Android.
    Price
    Free, MIT
    Support
    Community and repository issues
FAQ

Common questions.

Does Wispr Flow work on Linux?
No. Wispr Flow ships for macOS, Windows and iPhone. Neither do Typeless, Superwhisper, SuperDictate, Whisperstream or Dragon. Lven Instant and Lven Cloud do, and OpenWhispr lists Linux on its site.
Does dictation work on Wayland?
Lven Instant's supported session is X11, where the app holds Right Ctrl itself. On Wayland you bind lven-linux --toggle in your compositor, since Wayland gives no application a global shortcut, and text goes in through accessibility where the app you type into allows it.
Which distributions are supported?
Any 64-bit distribution with glibc 2.34 or newer — Ubuntu 22.04 and later, Debian 12, Fedora 35 and later — with PipeWire or PulseAudio. Everything the app needs, speech engine included, ships inside the package.
Sources
  1. Wispr Flow pricing page — Pro $15/user/mo monthly or $12/user/mo billed annually; free tier 2,000 words/week on desktop
  2. Digital Trends — Wispr Flow traces accuracy complaints to an over-aggressive Auto Cleanup that changed words
  3. Typeless — home page and pricing page: Mac, Windows, iOS and Android; polished-writing rewrite; free tier 8,000 words/week; $12/member/mo billed yearly, $30 monthly
  4. Superwhisper — AI voice to text for macOS, Windows and iOS; offline and cloud models
  5. ClassEve — the engine Lven Instant ships vs. Whisper-class models, measured on consumer-grade hardware (speed, accuracy, latency)
  6. ClassEve — What the polish pass changes: the 31-case golden corpus
Head to head
What is on-device speech to text?
Lven Instant vs. OpenWhisprLven Instant vs. Wispr FlowLven Instant vs. Superwhisper
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