// OMG! UBUNTU! — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
I went hands-on with Ubuntu’s AI voice typing feature
AI-powered voice typing is coming to Ubuntu in Myna, a speech-to-text feature that lets you talk into any valid text field. It’s still a work in progress, but I grabbed an early build to see how it’s shaping up.
With Ubuntu 26.10 now entering its freeze, the user-facing pieces of myna are falling in to place. This week, a new GNOME Shell extension was added to default installs to provide an on-screen indicator when myna is listening and recording.
To be clear: Myna is not a GNOME Shell extension. It’s an orchestrator that manages loading the AI model, listening for hot-key activation, passing audio from your microphone to the model to be transcribed and feeding the output back to a text field over IBus1.
But the extension is important as it’s the bit you see, telling you when Myna is actively listening to and processing audio.
Below is a screen recording where I activate Myna, and use it to transcribe a sentence into the Text Editor app:
The GitHub for myna says2: “Whether you are looking to dictate text hands-free, improve accessibility, or streamline your workflow, myna brings seamless voice recognition directly to your Linux ecosystem.”
Myna is activated by pressing (but NOT holding) a hotkey to activate listening. In my testing this was configured to super + t.
An onscreen display (OSD) shows when listening is active. As you talk, an animated ‘wave’ inside the OSD oscillates, which is a nice bit of confirmatory feedback so you know it’s working.
When you’re done, you press the same keyboard shortcut again. The OSD animation goes flat as the audio is transcribed in the background. After a short pause, the text appears in the text field of whatever app was focused when you activated speech-to-text.
What happens if you close or minimise the ‘target’ window? The myna OSD lets you know focus was lost.