By admin 
Ubuntu is adding AI features this year, and founder Mark Shuttleworth hopes the distro will become the OS for the ‘agentic’ era. But big ambitions start with 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 a hotkey, chat at your computer and, like magic, your words type on screen. Canonical’s VP of Engineering Jon Seager said any text field you can type in, you can talk into (or, in my case, talk at).
Yay, AI. Why is typing now uncool? Seager’s answer, delivered at the Ubuntu Summit: “Why type like an animal to your agent when you can just talk to it?”.
—Animal? I type gracefully, thank you! Good, cos you’ll your fingers to backspace through whatever the audio transcription model decides you said when you dictate an e-mail with your mouth was full of doughnut. No-one will be able to dictate into password fields though. That’d be dumb.
AI, though… This isn’t a conversational chatbot fused into the GNOME panel, nor a creepy “copilot” rifling through your root privileges. This is voice dictation powered by speech recognition models. 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 his Cylons or something? Your voice goes nowhere. Ubuntu will use a local, open model that runs locally, on your device. No cloud AI services. Your mic only wakes up if you press the relevant hotkey and audio is processed in memory before being junked. At least, that’s the plan.
—plan? I’m hedging as the Myna GitHub is just aims and diagrams right now (hence my flowery metaphor about seeds at the start). It details the flow: an Inference Snap, sandboxed, processes audio while Myna, a speech orchestrator, manages the where and when.
Ah, so I can’t test this. Not yet (but time is ticking). Canonical’s been fielding feedback from people who already use dictation tools elsewhere to help it dial in the specifics. So 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 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.
Still sounds niche. Illusory productivitymaxxing scenarios of VC bros writing pitches mid bench, the real boost is in accessibility. Text-to-speech tools on Ubuntu aren’t renowned for being great. If the AI boom means they improve, that’s good, right?
Will it work if I don’t speak English? Language coverage will rely on whichever 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!
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, what’s the weather/play mgk/reorder loo roll”.
This is part of our Explainer format, where we chat through the What and How of Whatever to dig into the details without the hype and jargon.