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rcspam edited this page Apr 21, 2026 · 12 revisions

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Tray Icon

The dictee tray icon (dictee-tray) is a PyQt6 background service that provides the same features as the Plasmoid-Widget on non-KDE desktops: GNOME, XFCE, Cinnamon, Sway, Hyprland — anywhere a system tray protocol is available.

On KDE Plasma the tray integrates via StatusNotifierItem (SNI). On GNOME/Ubuntu it falls back to AppIndicator3 (auto-detected at startup). Both modes support automatic light/dark theme tracking and match the plasmoid feature-for-feature.

Tray icon with context menu expanded

Table of Contents

When to use tray vs plasmoid

Desktop Recommended Why
KDE Plasma 6 Plasmoid-Widget Native QML, animation-rich popup
KDE Plasma 5 Tray No Plasma 5 plasmoid in v1.3
GNOME (with extensions) Tray AppIndicator3 fallback works
GNOME (no extensions) Tray via Top Icons Plus Plain dictee-tray needs a status area
XFCE / Cinnamon / MATE Tray Native SNI / AppIndicator support
Sway / i3 / Hyprland Tray via waybar SNI module Or use keyboard shortcuts exclusively
LXDE / LXQt Tray Uses xembed-sni-proxy on Qt 6

Both can coexist — running both plasmoid + tray on the same KDE session just duplicates status indicators. Pick one.

Install

The tray icon is bundled with the main dictee package:

sudo apt install ./dictee-cuda_1.3.0_amd64.deb
# or
sudo dnf install ./dictee-cuda-1.3.0-1.x86_64.rpm

No standalone package — the tray ships with the main binary.

Launch

Manual:

dictee-tray &

Press Ctrl+C in the terminal or right-click the tray icon → Quit to stop.

Autostart as systemd user service

A systemd unit is shipped at /usr/lib/systemd/user/dictee-tray.service:

[Unit]
Description=Dictée Tray Icon
After=dictee.service dictee-vosk.service dictee-whisper.service dictee-canary.service
BindsTo=graphical-session.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dictee-tray
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=3

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical-session.target

Enable on session start:

systemctl --user enable --now dictee-tray

Disable:

systemctl --user disable --now dictee-tray

Starting from graphical-session.target means the tray appears only after your desktop is fully loaded — no race with panel/shell initialization.

Menu structure

Left-click on the tray icon triggers immediate dictation (equivalent to pressing your shortcut). Middle-click cancels an ongoing recording.

Right-click opens a context menu:

┌─ Dictate
├─ Dictate + Translate
├─ Cancel
├─────────────
├─ ASR backend ▸
│    ├─ ◉ Parakeet-TDT
│    ├─ ○ Canary-1B
│    ├─ ○ faster-whisper
│    └─ ○ Vosk
├─ Translation backend ▸
│    ├─ ◉ Google
│    ├─ ○ Bing
│    ├─ ○ LibreTranslate
│    └─ ○ Ollama
├─ Target language ▸ (dynamic, per backend)
├─────────────
├─ ☐ LLM correction
├─ ☐ Short-text keepcaps
├─ ☐ Meeting mode (diarization)
├─────────────
├─ Open Setup Wizard
├─ Daemon ▸
│    ├─ Restart
│    ├─ Status
│    └─ Show logs
├─ About Dictée
└─ Quit

All backend switches trigger dictee-switch-backend under the hood — no service restart needed.

Status icons

The icon reflects daemon state in real-time. All icons are custom parakeet SVGs (not emojis) shipped at /usr/share/dictee/icons/:

State Light theme Dark theme SVG file Meaning
Ready (idle) parakeet-active(.svg/-dark.svg) Daemon ready, no dictation
Recording (same) parakeet-recording.svg Audio being captured
Transcribing (same) parakeet-transcribing.svg Model inference in progress
Diarizing (meeting) (same) parakeet-diarize.svg Meeting mode active
Inactive parakeet-inactive(.svg/-dark.svg) Daemon stopped
Offline (same) parakeet-offline.svg Daemon unavailable

The tray picks the -dark variant automatically based on the detected theme (active + inactive ship both variants; other states use a single theme-neutral icon).

Theme detection

dictee-tray uses QPalette to detect the desktop theme at startup:

palette = QApplication.palette()
bg = palette.color(QPalette.ColorRole.Window)
is_dark = (bg.lightness() < 128)

It also listens for paletteChanged to switch icons live if you flip your theme mid-session.

For KDE Plasma specifically, a secondary check reads kdeglobals for ColorScheme — more robust than QPalette on fresh sessions where palette defaults haven't initialized (fix in v1.3-rc1).

GNOME / Ubuntu (AppIndicator3)

GNOME Shell removed native system tray support in version 3.26 (2017). For dictee-tray to appear you need one of:

dictee-tray auto-detects AppIndicator3 via python3-pyqt6.qtsvg + gir1.2-ayatanaappindicator3-0.1 and uses it transparently. If the extension is missing you'll see a console warning at startup.

Tiling window managers

Sway / i3 / Hyprland don't have a system tray by default. Two options:

Option A — waybar with SNI module

Add to ~/.config/waybar/config.jsonc:

{
  "modules-right": ["tray", "pulseaudio", "clock"],
  "tray": {
    "icon-size": 21,
    "spacing": 10
  }
}

Then systemctl --user enable --now dictee-tray — the icon appears in waybar.

Option B — no tray, keyboard only

If you don't want a tray on your minimal setup, skip dictee-tray entirely and rely on:

  • Keyboard shortcuts for dictate / translate / cancel (see Keyboard-Shortcuts)
  • dictee-switch-backend CLI for backend changes
  • dictee-setup GUI for occasional reconfiguration

Perfectly functional — the tray is convenience, not required.

Cross-process sync

Same mechanism as the plasmoid: QFileSystemWatcher on /dev/shm/.dictee_state*. Changes made in the tray (backend switch, toggle flip) propagate to the plasmoid in < 50 ms on a typical kernel.

See Plasmoid-Widget#cross-process-sync for the full mechanism.

Known issues

Icon missing on fresh GNOME install

Install the AppIndicator extension from extensions.gnome.org and restart GNOME Shell (Alt+F2, r, Enter on Xorg; log out/in on Wayland).

KDE replaces notification ID on reuse

Fixed in v1.3-beta4. Earlier versions could leak "ghost" notifications when KDE ignored replace-id on expired notifications. The fix uses timeout=0 + explicit D-Bus CloseNotification call.

SNI on Qt 6.x requires xdg-desktop-portal

If the tray icon doesn't appear on KDE / Sway:

sudo apt install xdg-desktop-portal xdg-desktop-portal-kde  # or -gnome, -wlr

Next steps

📖 dictee Wiki

🇬🇧 Home · 🇫🇷 Accueil

Getting started / Premiers pas

Speech recognition / ASR

Translation / Traduction

Post-processing / Post-traitement

CLI

Reference / Référence

🏠 Repo · 📦 Releases · 🐛 Issues

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