Chris Fisher Co-founder of Jupiter Broadcasting, a Linux and open source podcast network launched in 2008, who hosts shows on Linux, software development and self-hosting.

“Here's the argument, and I'm starting to buy it: most people that are probably in the tech field can probably type 100, 110 words per minute, and the average voice dictation is about 140 words per minute. So I've been using it, and I've been pretty darn impressed.”

LINUX Unplugged · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

Context

In the picks segment, Chris recommended a local push-to-talk dictation tool and explains why he now prefers dictating to typing.

Listen to the episode → More from Chris Fisher → More Hands-On Engineering Podcasts quotes →

Transcript

LINUX Unplugged Around 1:16:38 into the episode

Chris Fisher

…UI that pops up that shows you that it's transcribing with an accurate-ish waveform, which I'll take these days. I'll take it. They have clients available for Mac OS, Windows, and of course, Linux. It's packaged for Debian, Fedora, Nix, and it is in the AUR, and it is also available for ARM64.

Wes Payne

And you kind of buried the lead there, but it's from the folks behind Open Code.

Chris Fisher

Yes, yeah. And you can use it to interact with your Open Code prompts and whatnot as well. So people, you know, here's the argument, and I'm starting to buy it: is most people that are probably in the tech field, you know, they can probably type 100, 110 words per minute. And the average voice dictation is about 140 words per minute. So I've been using it, and I've been pretty darn impressed. It took a bit. I had to build some Rust dependencies, so it means my future updates from time to time are going to take an extra 20 to 30 minutes. But it works, and it works really well and really fast. So I just wanted to give it a mention.

Wes Payne

Stay tuned for a similar tool we're going to talk about in the next episode.

Chris Fisher

Yes, thank you. That's one of the reasons I wanted to mention this is because we're going to take a look at the canonical tool next episode. We'll link to this though in the show notes if you want to check it out. I also played around with Hocum. I think that's how you say it?

Wes Payne

Hocum.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from LINUX Unplugged

“Ptrace is being restricted by default. This doesn't break strace, but if you're trying to trace an already running process, then you're going to need to change a system setting. What they're doing, which is kind of clever, is they ship scope zero, where a process can only do it to its own threads. But if you install a debugging tool that might need this functionality legitimately, it ships a linked package which sets that system setting back to one. So hopefully you won't notice it.” — Wes Payne, LINUX Unplugged