Ubuntu is adding AI features this year, and founder Mark Shuttleworth hopes to position the Linux distribution as the OS for the ‘agentic’ era. But big ambitions start from small seeds, and the first to be planted is a speech-to-text tool named Myna.
Name: Myna.
Age: Minus 4 months (it’ll debut in Ubuntu 26.10, out in October).
Appearance. None (it’ll be a keyboard shortcut you press to avoid using your keyboard).
What’s this about? A “lightweight speech-to-text application” powered by AI. You press and hold a hotkey, chat at your computer and, like magic, your words are typed screen. Canonical’s VP of Engineering Jon Seager has said any text field you can type in, you can talk into (or, in my case, talk down to).
Mmm, AI. Is typing now uncool? Seager, speaking at the Ubuntu Summit in May, positioned it thus: “Why type like an animal to your agent when you can just talk to it?”.
—’Animal?‘ I type very gracefully, thank you! Good, cos you’ll likely still need fingers to backspace through what the audio transcription model decided you said when you tried dictating an e-mail with your mouth full of doughnut. You won’t be able to dictate into password fields though. That’d be dumb.
AI, though… This won’t be a conversational chatbot fused into the GNOME panel, nor a creepy “copilot” rifling through your root privileges to provide sassy feedback on command. This is simply voice dictation powered by a speech recognition model. Decent dictation on Linux has been demanded for decades. Here, Canonical is set to actually deliver it.
Will Sam Altman use my voice to train Cylons or whatever? Myna will be powered by an open AI model that runs locally, on your device, so no cloud AI services or companies are involved. Your mic will only wake up if you press (and hold) the relevant hotkey. Audio gets processed in memory before being junked. At least, that’s the plan.
—plan? I’m hedging; the Myna GitHub is a little empty on specifics, all aims and diagrams right now (hence my flowery metaphor about seeds at the start). It does detail the flow: an Inference Snap, sandboxed, processes audio while Myna, a speech orchestrator, manages the where and when.
So I can’t test this. Not at the time I write this. Canonical has been fielding feedback from people who use dictation tools elsewhere to help it lock in the detail on Myna’s first iteration. There’s time to shout, if shouting’s your thing, and if you use dictation regularly, it probably is.
A niche feature dressed up as a flagship one, then. Nobody’s going to want to dictate shell commands to their terminal for fun (the novelty of that lasts 4m 10s exactly). But for long-form verbiage, speech-to-text is used by people who love the sound of their own voice talk faster than they type. However, Myna is mainly going to be useful for short bursts of speech, around 30 second or so, since the plan is you’ll need to press a key and hold it.
Still sounds niche. Nah, forget the productivitymaxxing scenes of tech bros writing VC pitches mid-bicep curl; the real day-to-day benefit is in accessibility. Text-to-speech tools on Ubuntu aren’t renowned for being fantastic. If the AI boom means they improve, that’s a good thing.
Will it work if I don’t speak English? Language coverage will depend on the model Myna is hooked up to. Canonical’s been looking at Whisper, Nvidia’s Nemotron, Parakeet and Qwen3-ASR, and some of these do offer multilingual variants. Ask me in October.
But it isn’t a voice assistant, right? No – by design. Voice commands, desktop control, wake words and continuous listening are out of scope for Myna (for now). Canonical says it wants to focus on getting the basics right first.
That will be a first. Woah now, r/linux!
Why’s it called Myna? The myna bird is known for mimicking human speech (eerily well) so the name is a nod to that. Though here, Myna doesn’t mimic you it just puts your words in the right box, which is a division of labour the name doesn’t capture, but hey: that’s only a myna quibble1.
My-nah; Ubuntu will let me opt-out, right? Mercifully, yes. AI features in Ubuntu will use models too big to bundle in the OS installer, so they will be Snaps you can remove. AI weariness and workslop fatigue is real thing, so it might be cathartic to type sudo snap remove all-the-ai.
Type? Surely you mean scream? Droll.
Do say: “Better dictation on Linux – at last”.
Don’t say: “Hey Myna…” *pause* “…reorder loo roll”.
This is part of our Explainer format, where we chat through the Why, How and, more often, the Whatever without without the hype and jargon.
- Myna/minor, get it? No? Tough crowd. ↩︎