Ever wished you could talk in to a text field rather than type? Ubuntu 26.10 hears you – quite literally.
Canonical’s VP of Engineer Jon Seager, at the Ubuntu Summit, said the distro will soon lets users “press a button and talk into any field that you could previously type in”.
A small, on-device AI language parsing model like Whisper will power the feature.
It’s part of a wider push to integrate AI features in Ubuntu this year, with founder Mark Shuttleworth aiming to position Ubuntu as the ‘OS for agentic AI’.
The feature aims to bolster Ubuntu’s accessibility, but Seager notes it offers a ‘convenience’ for all desktop users, quipping: “Why type like an animal to your [AI] agent when you can just talk to it”.
“Speaking to a model and getting text output is really easy”, Seager said, but added “plumbing it into all of the various places where you can type text on a modern desktop is going [to be] tricky”.
While the aim is (seemingly) for every text surface on Ubuntu desktop to be made talk-to-able1, reliable, cross-toolkit integration of text-to-speech won’t magic itself into existence.
The aim is to ship the AI-powered text-to-speech in Ubuntu 26.10 by default, though whether it’s on by default or an (ideally) opt-in preview feature is TBD – as is whether it’ll ship alongside other planned AI features integrations.
Talk-to-type is an example of an ‘explicit’ AI feature in Ubuntu, i.e., one you can see and interact with.
Canonical is adding ‘implicit’ AI features to Ubuntu, which work behind the scenes using local models. Seager mentions plans to use AI to improve webcam autofocus and enhance microphone quality as two ‘implicit’ examples.
Would you find typing with your voice a major boon? Leave a comment below to let me know.
- The usefulness of text-to-speech input (for non-accessibility needs) reduces with character-count. Using it to bark “Firefox” in the GNOME Shell overview is more effort than typing “F“, “I” and—oh, there it is. Enter. ↩︎
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