// OMG! UBUNTU! — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Ubuntu plans to add AI-powered voice input to all text fields
"Why type like an animal?", posits Canonical's VP of Engineering
Ever wished you could talk in to a text field rather than type? Ubuntu 26.10 hears you – quite literally.
Canonical’s VP of Engineer Jon Seager, at the Ubuntu Summit, said the distro will soon lets users “press a button and talk into any field that you could previously type in”.
A small, on-device AI language parsing model like Whisper will power the feature.
It’s part of a wider push to integrate AI features in Ubuntu this year, with founder Mark Shuttleworth aiming to position Ubuntu as the ‘OS for agentic AI’.
AI features in Ubuntu will be shipped as Snap packages that users will be free to uninstall – a ‘kill switch’ of sorts.
The feature aims to bolster Ubuntu’s accessibility, but Seager notes it offers a ‘convenience’ for all desktop users, quipping: “Why type like an animal to your [AI] agent when you can just talk to it”.
“Speaking to a model and getting text output is really easy”, Seager said, but added “plumbing it into all of the various places where you can type text on a modern desktop is going [to be] tricky”.
While the aim is (seemingly) for every text surface on Ubuntu desktop to be made talk-to-able1, reliable, cross-toolkit integration of text-to-speech won’t magic itself into existence.
The aim is to ship the AI-powered text-to-speech in Ubuntu 26.10 by default, though whether it’s on by default or an (ideally) opt-in preview feature is TBD – as is whether it’ll ship alongside other planned AI features integrations.