Alchemist on Deck
L4 and R4 toggle dictation over any game on the Steam Deck, real time dictation runs on the Deck itself, and two new pill skins land everywhere.
Dictate over any game on the Steam Deck
Hold L4 and R4, the back grips, to toggle dictation from inside any running game. No Steam Input setup, nothing to map per game, and it works the same in desktop mode and over a running game. Text lands on the clipboard rather than being typed, since Ctrl+V means crouch and melee in most games. Verified in Cuphead at 18 ms from stop to clipboard.
Real time dictation now runs on the Steam Deck too, local, with words appearing as you talk, measured at 29 to 33 ms stop to paste. Dictations over a Steam game are now saved in your history under the game's real name (Cuphead, Valheim) instead of a generic window id.
Edit the live text while it streams
Click any sentence on the real time surface while the words are still appearing and fix it before it lands. Your version is what pastes, not the engine's hearing, and the fix becomes a learned correction for next time. It teaches in terminals and other apps as well as native text fields.
Two new pill skins: Handheld One and its Dark Edition
005 Handheld One draws the pill as a handheld seen dead on: dark line work on a light grey body, forty thin bars for the voice on its screen, a word count and a blinking REC dot up top, and both trackpads filling with the voice level. 006 Handheld One Dark Edition is the same drawing in light lines on a near black body. Both are Pro, draw on Mac, Windows, Linux X11 and Linux Wayland, and draw larger on the Steam Deck's screen.
New
- Added a numbered Appearance picker that lists every skin by number and release date, greys out what this machine cannot draw and shows why, and marks Pro skins for free users.
- Added the Segment LCD and Typewriter skins drawing on Linux Wayland desktops.
- Added the glass skins to the notch and toolbar on Linux Wayland desktops.
- Added the Live Transcript layouts, Log and Paragraph, to the pill on Linux Wayland desktops.
- Added instant volume restore when ducking audio for dictation on the Steam Deck, instead of a fade that stepped audibly.
Improvements
- Sped up cloud dictation on the Steam Deck from about 640 ms to 377 to 519 ms, stop to paste.
- Sped up dictation on the Steam Deck and other small machines; pastes that previously took 90 to 555 ms now land in the low tens of milliseconds.
- Improved cloud dictation to keep your words when the cloud fails, transcribing them on this machine instead of discarding them.
- Brought the ghosting of the live transcript, when you hover the pill during a dictation, to Linux Wayland, matching Mac and Windows.
- Improved history to show the real names of native Linux games and Linux devices.
No longer broken
- Fixed the pill never appearing on stock SteamOS, Arch, Fedora 41 and up, and Ubuntu 25.04 and up.
- Fixed dictation audio never saving on SteamOS, Fedora and Arch.
- Fixed games losing controller input after a dictation typed into them.
- Fixed the idle pill tab sitting a panel height above the taskbar on KDE Plasma 6.4.
- Fixed settings windows opening behind other apps on KDE Plasma Wayland.
- Fixed pastes on Linux Wayland staying slow until a restart after the app briefly froze.
- Fixed terminal pastes misfiring on apps like Steam, Postman and anything named Studio.
- Fixed correction rules changing part of an unrelated word, so fixing "zoo" no longer turned "zoom" into "zoomm".
- Fixed the settings, snooze and palette icons punching a hole through the toolbar to the desktop behind it.
- Fixed the pill not appearing after installing from the AUR package on a fresh system.
- Fixed the Mac model label showing the wrong Apple Silicon chip.
- Fixed weather for Athens, Georgia using the weather for Athens, Greece.
- Fixed punctuation drifting after about 30 seconds of continuous speech in real time dictation on Mac and Linux.
