System requirements
Speakey runs entirely on your own machine, so the only real requirement is a reasonably modern 64-bit desktop. Here's exactly what each platform needs — and, for Linux, an honest note on what we've actually tested versus what simply should work.
Windows
Windows 10 or Windows 11, 64-bit. Nothing else to install — the installer bundles everything. Both transcription engines ship in every build: faster-whisper (NVIDIA CUDA, 100+ languages) and Parakeet (any GPU or plain CPU, 25 European languages). A GPU is recommended but not required.
Linux
Any modern 64-bit (x86_64) Linux desktop. Under the hood Speakey uses the standard desktop runtime — GTK 3 with WebKitGTK (webkit2gtk-4.1) — so the practical floor is a distro recent enough to ship it: Ubuntu 22.04 or newer, Debian 12 or newer, and equivalents (Fedora 36+, and other current releases). Older distributions ship an incompatible WebKit and won't run the bundles. It works under both Wayland and X11.
- Debian / Ubuntu (and derivatives): install the
.deb. Setup grants Speakey input access so it can read your hotkey and type for you. - Everything else: use the portable AppImage — download, make it executable, and run it. No install step.
- GPU: the standard build runs on CPU everywhere; a separate CUDA build accelerates on NVIDIA (Turing generation or newer).
- 64-bit x86_64 only — there is no ARM build yet.
We develop and test Speakey on Ubuntu (24.04 and 26.04). Other modern 64-bit distributions should work — the AppImage in particular is built to be portable — but we don't formally test each one. If Speakey doesn't run on your distro, that's a bug we want to hear about; send us feedback from inside the app and we'll take a look.
On every platform, transcription runs on your machine — no cloud, no account, nothing leaves your computer. The requirements above are just what it takes to run the app, not a phone-home.