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Installation

Requirements

  • Linux with GNOME Shell 47+ on Wayland
  • Working microphone
  • ~2 GB disk space for models
  • Python 3.12 — source install only (not 3.13/3.14, see notes below); the prebuilt packages bundle their own runtime

Tested on Fedora and NixOS.

Quick install (prebuilt packages)

The easiest path. Download the latest app package and a language pack from the Releases page and install them together:

sudo apt install ./easyspeak_*_amd64.deb ./easyspeak-lang-en_*_all.deb

sudo dnf install ./easyspeak-*.x86_64.rpm ./easyspeak-lang-en-*.noarch.rpm

This bundles the Python runtime, Piper, the GNOME Shell extension, and the speech models — no pip/uv step and no compiler. Log out and back in once after the first launch so GNOME loads the bundled extension. See the Packaging guide for offline notes, more languages, and hold-to-dictate setup.

Install from source

For development, or to run the latest unreleased code, install from the repository. This path needs system build dependencies and Python 3.12.

Python 3.12

Fedora 43's default python3 is 3.14. Unfortunately, we depend on a few Google packages that are not available for Python 3.13+ yet.

sudo dnf install python3.12
python3.12 --version  # Verify it's installed

1. System packages

sudo dnf install \
  pipewire-utils \
  wireplumber \
  at-spi2-core \
  python3-gobject \
  libadwaita \
  qutebrowser \
  glib2 \
  ffmpeg-free \
  pulseaudio-utils \
  sound-theme-freedesktop \
  portaudio-devel \
  python3.12-devel \
  gcc

python3-gobject and libadwaita power the tray menu's About EasySpeak window. They ship with any GNOME desktop, so they're usually already present; they're listed here for the sake of minimal or non-GNOME installs.

2. Python packages

python3.12 -m venv ~/easyspeak-venv
source ~/easyspeak-venv/bin/activate
pip install faster-whisper openwakeword numpy pyaudio
cd ~/easyspeak
pip install -e .

If you use uv you can ignore the steps that create a virtual environment and simply run:

uv run easyspeak

uv will transparently create and update a virtual environment, and run EasySpeak from in there.

3. Piper TTS

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
cd ~/.local/bin
wget https://github.com/rhasspy/piper/releases/download/2023.11.14-2/piper_linux_x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzf piper_linux_x86_64.tar.gz
rm piper_linux_x86_64.tar.gz

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin/piper:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/piper
cd ~/.local/share/piper
wget -O en_US-amy-medium.onnx \
  "https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_US/amy/medium/en_US-amy-medium.onnx"
wget -O en_US-amy-medium.onnx.json \
  "https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_US/amy/medium/en_US-amy-medium.onnx.json"

4. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/ctsdownloads/easyspeak.git ~/easyspeak
cd ~/easyspeak

Head tracking (optional)

Head tracking requires a webcam and additional dependencies:

pip install '.[head-tracking]'
# or, with uv
uv run --extra head-tracking easyspeak

The head-tracking extra pulls in sixdrepnet and opencv-python.