Hi everyone!
It has been a while since the last significant release.
This release introduces initial support for "AI powered" features such as the ability to do quick chats with models from within the launcher and speech to text. Available on all OSes, now.
I'm going to introduce the new major features below, as per usual you can find the full documentation here.
Note: for people that dislike AI, note that this release doesn't change anything for you. You need to configure at least one AI provider in order to use these features.
AI Chat
This has been a very popular demand for a long time: the ability to run quick chats with AI models from within the launcher. You can now just do that.
All you need to do is to go to the "AI" extension preferences and configure a provider. Once that is done, you can just start quick chats from the launcher when you want. You can also continue the chat inside a bigger, dedicated window if you need to.
You are able to choose from a huge variety of different AI providers (cloud or local), and you can even use your Codex/Claude subscription directly for this (although this comes with a few limitations at the moment, please refer to the docs).
I would recommend getting an OpenRouter key as this is by far the most flexible options. Also, deepseek flash is really good and fast.
Each conversation is automaticalled stored to the conversation database so that you can retrieve it later.
Tool calling
This release ships with initial support for tool calling, including very basic tools such as one to run shell commands, read Vicinae configuration, clipboard history, search files, etc... We will add the ability for extensions to provide their own tools to AI models very soon.
Note, for now tool calling doesn't work with CLIs such as claude-code and codex.
Speech to text (dictation)
With the dictation feature, you can turn your speech into text that is automatically copied or pasted to the active window. There are a lot of apps on the market that already allow you to do that, so let me list all the nice features we have related to dictation:
- on supported Wayland compositors (for now, that's only Hyprland) push-to-talk works out of the box. All you need to do is assign a shortcut to the "Dictate" command.
- built-in local transcription support. You can download parakeet/whisper models from Vicinae directly and let it handle the transcription part for you. Most builds come with vulkan GPU acceleration enabled, so that you can get near instantaneous transcriptions. If you would rather use cloud models for transcription as well, that's also possible.
- custom per-app LLM-powered rewrite styles, in order to clean and smooth up the transcription. You can use any LLM from your configured providers for this (that includes claude-code and codex!)
- pauses currently playing media by default
- custom vocabulary, to fix common mispellings (works best with a rewrite style)
- history of all past dictations, can be very useful if you pasted it into the void or something like that :)
The plan is to further enhance what dictation can do as new interesting use cases are found.
Other things
As always, minor fixes or feature additions that don't really deserve the spotlight.
Please report any bug/enhancement you are thinking about via the issue tracker, or come talk about it on Discord, that works too :D
Have a good one!
Aurelle
What's Changed
- feat: browser extension release workflow by @aurelleb in #2111
- feat(browser-extension): search bookmarks by @aurelleb in #2115
- fix(clipboard): paste copied files as files on GNOME by @dagimg-dot in #2119
- fix(clipboard): keep concealed copies out of the history on GNOME by @dagimg-dot in #2117
- feat(browser-extension): search/clear browsing history command by @aurelleb in #2116
- feat: add server to client requests to figura by @aurelleb in #2124
- Add Spanish (es-ES) translation support by @alv-cor in #2130
- feat: initial AI chat and dictation support by @aurelleb in #2132
New Contributors
Full Changelog: v0.29.2...v0.30.0
Sponsors
Thanks to our sponsors for supporting vicinae!