Wispr Flow doesn't run on Linux. Willow doesn't. Voibe, VoiceInk, Superwhisper, Monologue: none of them. Voca does.
Most "best dictation app of 2026" lists are really "best macOS dictation app of 2026" lists with the qualifier missing. The mainstream commercial options ship for Mac, sometimes Windows, almost never Linux. If you've been using nerd-dictation, Numen, Talon, or one of the Whisper-based local scripts because that was the only Linux option available, this page is for you.
Voca ships a real Linux build. Same hotkey-and-speak workflow as the Mac and Windows versions. System-wide, works in any text field. $6 a month.
No install for the demo, no card required.
Three reasons, none of them good.
The result is that Linux developers, who arguably benefit most from voice dictation (heavy AI prompting workflows, lots of CLI work, a culture comfortable with hotkeys), have had the worst tooling. Voca is the same hosted Whisper-class accuracy you'd get on Mac, with a Linux build that works.
Linux is a smaller market, the GUI fragmentation between GNOME, KDE, X11, and Wayland makes building a polished desktop app harder, and the engineering investment doesn't always pencil. So they ship for Mac and call it done.
Talon, Numen, nerd-dictation, whisper.cpp wrappers all work, but they require setup, and accuracy without a fine-tuned model is uneven on technical vocabulary.
If you're on Linux because you chose Linux, you're not switching to a Mac to dictate.
Voca's Linux build runs on the major distros: Ubuntu, Pop_OS, Debian, Fedora, Arch, openSUSE, and most of their derivatives. It works under both X11 and Wayland.
If you're on a less common distro, the AppImage is the safest bet for compatibility.
System-wide. Wherever there's a text field, there's a place Voca can put text. The most common surfaces:
Anywhere your cursor sits, transcribed text arrives.
VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains family (IntelliJ, PyCharm, GoLand, etc.), Sublime, Zed, Helix.
GNOME Terminal, Konsole, Alacritty, Kitty, Wezterm, Foot, Ghostty.
Firefox, Chromium, Brave, LibreWolf, Vivaldi.
Slack, Element, Discord, Zulip, Teams (web).
Obsidian, Logseq, Joplin, Standard Notes, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice.
Thunderbird, web Gmail, web Fastmail, web Proton.
Linux users tend to be more privacy-aware than the median desktop user. Voca's design is the simpler version: the microphone is on while you hold the hotkey, the audio goes to our server, transcription happens, audio is deleted, text comes back. Nothing else.
In your terminal. In your IDE. In your browser. In Slack. In any text field.
Filler words removed. Formatting inferred. 90+ languages supported.
0.4 seconds, median.
The local-Whisper options are great if you have the patience to maintain them. Voca is for the days you don't. Also worth a look: Voca vs Wispr Flow.
The browser version runs in any modern browser without an install. Useful for testing accuracy before pulling the desktop binary down.
Yes. Voca runs under both X11 and Wayland on supported distros.
The most common ones (Ubuntu, Pop_OS, Debian, Fedora, Arch, openSUSE) and most of their derivatives. The AppImage build runs on most distros that aren't explicitly on the list.
First-class. The Linux build is built and shipped at the same cadence as the Mac and Windows builds, with the same feature set.
Yes. Voca works in any text field, including terminal emulators (GNOME Terminal, Konsole, Alacritty, Kitty, Wezterm, Foot, Ghostty). Useful for typing long shell commands, commit messages, and prompts to CLI agents like Claude Code.
Yes. All of them have native Linux builds, and Voca operates at the OS level, so transcribed text appears wherever the cursor is in any of them. See Voca for Cursor.
The browser demo runs without an install or a card. After that, the desktop app gives 30 free minutes of transcription per month on the free tier.
No. Audio is deleted on transcription. We don't train on it, log it, or back it up. Metadata for billing (duration, timestamp, model) is the only thing kept.
$6/month flat or $0.10/hour pay-as-you-go. Same hotkey on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Pairs with Voca for Cursor and Voca for Claude Code. See team pricing for shared seats.