fuelCell Voice Typing

Speak into any text box on your Steam Frame: the Steam store search, a browser, Discord. It also gives you easy Copy, Paste and Select all using your controllers.

• 🎙️ Hold A + B, talk, let go. Your words get typed wherever your cursor is, and are copied too.
• 📋 Trigger + Y copies, Trigger + A pastes, Trigger + X selects all.
• 🔒 Free and private. Speech recognition runs on the headset itself, with no account and nothing sent online.

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Install (about 5 minutes)

You only do this once.

1. Open the desktop on your Frame. Switch the Frame to its Linux desktop (KDE) and open Konsole, the terminal app.

2. Copy and paste this line into Konsole, then press Enter:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/juanramosjr1/frame-voice/main/install.sh | bash && exec bash

The installer shows 5 steps and tells you when it's done. Running it again updates the app.

If it asks for a password: voice typing needs permission to act like a keyboard. If you've never set a password, press Ctrl+C, type passwd, press Enter, choose a password, then run the line from step 2 again.

3. Open fuelCell Voice Typing from your apps. If the bottom of the window says the shortcuts need a SteamVR setting, tap Turn on. (That's SteamVR's Enable global input from overlays setting. It lets the app use your controller buttons while the Steam menu or the desktop is in front.)

That's it. From now on the app starts by itself every time SteamVR starts, so whenever the headset is on, the shortcuts work without opening anything.(If the installer said the typing permission takes effect after a restart, restart the headset once.)

To make sure everything is set up, run this in Konsole:

~/.local/bin/frame-voice --check

(In a new Konsole window, frame-voice --check works too.)

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How to use it

What you want	How (default buttons)
Type with your voice	Click a text box, hold A + B, talk, let go. Or open the app and tap the big mic.
Copy	Trigger + Y
Paste	Trigger + A
Select all	Trigger + X
Copy your last dictation again	Open the app and tap Copy

A, B, X and Y are the buttons on the right controller. While you talk, a small "Listening..." badge floats below your view, so you don't need the window open. Every dictation is also copied, so you can paste it again anywhere.

Tips

• The controller is the best way to talk into the Steam UI: click the text box with the trigger, then hold A + B. Tapping the mic in the window works too, but in some places clicking the window moves the cursor away from your text box. If that happens, the app tells you and your words are copied, so click the text box and paste.
• While a VR game is running, the shortcuts are paused so the game keeps its buttons. They work again as soon as you open the Steam menu.
• The app runs in the background whenever SteamVR runs. Opening it shows the window, and closing the window leaves the shortcuts running. Settings > Quit app stops it until SteamVR starts again or you open it.
• Last dictation shows what you said last, even if you said it with the window closed. Tap Copy to copy it again.

Change the shortcuts

Open Settings (the gear icon) and go to Controller shortcuts:

Layout	Talk
Hold A + B (default)	Hold A and B together, talk, let go
Trigger + B	Hold the trigger and B, talk, let go
Hold B	Hold B, talk, let go

In every layout, Trigger + A pastes, Trigger + Y copies and Trigger + X selects all. You can turn those off with Copy and paste shortcuts, and keep the shortcuts on during games with Keep shortcuts on during VR games.

Test your buttons shows each button light up as you press it, and what the combo does. While Settings is open, pressing buttons only lights them up there.

If you want different buttons, tap Customize buttons in SteamVR. That opens SteamVR's controller bindings screen for this app, where each of the app's buttons (A, B, X, Y, Trigger) can be moved to any button you like. If it doesn't open, go to SteamVR Settings > Controllers > Manage Controller Bindings and pick fuelCell Voice Typing.

Settings also has: speech model (Fast / Balanced / Most accurate, picked once and used every time), add a space after each dictation, press Enter after each dictation, and start automatically with SteamVR.

My words is for names and words it keeps getting wrong, like fuelCell or a game's name. Tap Edit my words, put each one on its own line, and save. Your next dictation spells them your way. (The list is the file ~/.config/frame-voice/words.txt, if you'd rather open it yourself.) Only add the words it gets wrong: a short list works best.

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Troubleshooting

Problem	Fix
Nothing gets typed	Click the text box with the controller first, then hold A + B. If it still doesn't work, run ~/.local/bin/frame-voice --check. If "Can type into apps" says FIX, run the installer again and restart.
Controller shortcuts do nothing	Open Settings and look at Test your buttons. If it says a SteamVR setting is needed, tap Turn on (or in SteamVR, show Advanced Settings, then Developer > Enable global input from overlays), then restart the headset. The dot at the bottom of the window is green when shortcuts are on.
Shortcuts stop during a game	That's on purpose, so the game keeps its buttons. Open the Steam menu, or turn on Keep shortcuts on during VR games.
The app doesn't start with the headset	Run ~/.local/bin/frame-voice --check. It should say Starts with SteamVR, and while SteamVR runs, Running in the background. If not, turn on Start automatically with SteamVR in Settings, or run the installer again.
frame-voice: command not found	Open a new Konsole window, or use the full path: ~/.local/bin/frame-voice --check.
"Didn't catch that"	Speak a little closer or longer, or try Most accurate in Settings.
Words come out wrong	Pick Most accurate in Settings, talk close to the mic, and keep holding until you've said the last word. For a name, add it to My words in Settings.
Typing is slow to start	Use Fast in Settings.
Wrong characters	The app types as a US keyboard layout.

Uninstall

bash ~/.local/share/frame-voice/uninstall.sh

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How it works (for the curious)

• Speech to text: faster-whisper, running locally on the headset's ARM CPU.
• Typing: a virtual USB keyboard made through Linux uinput, so anything that accepts a real keyboard accepts it, including the Steam client. Written in pure Python with nothing to compile.
• Controller shortcuts: SteamVR Input, with each button in its own action set (the approach Frame overlay apps such as Frametop use), so the app only takes the buttons it needs: A, B, X and Y, plus the trigger only while one of those is held. Combos are worked out by the app. Default bindings for the Steam Frame controllers (frame_controller), plus Quest/Touch and Index. A read-only second source (SteamVR's own controller binding page, adapted from Frametop) keeps them working if the SteamVR setting is off. The app uses Valve's official Linux ARM64 OpenVR library.
• Starting with SteamVR: SteamOS on the Frame runs SteamVR as a user service (steamvr.service). The app adds a small service of its own that starts and stops with it, the way Frametop's helpers do, and runs the shortcuts without a window. Opening the app hands the shortcuts to the window until it closes, so nothing is ever typed twice.
• Window: Qt (PySide6). On KDE the app adds a window rule so its window never takes keyboard focus, so pressing its buttons leaves your cursor in the text box, the same way an on-screen keyboard works. The window also ignores typed keys, so text can never trigger its buttons.

Testing

Every push runs the full test suite on GitHub on both x86 and ARM64 Linux. It runs the real installer, types through a real virtual keyboard and checks the key presses arrive, measures dictation accuracy on synthesized speech (clear, quiet and noisy) against the previous settings, checks that names on a word list come out spelled the list's way, and drives the controller logic frame by frame against a stand-in for SteamVR. It also starts and stops a stand-in steamvr.service in a real user session and checks the app starts and stops with it.

Not yet verified on a real Steam Frame:

• typing into the Steam store inside the SteamVR dashboard
• controller shortcuts with this version (button names are from Valve's Steam Frame docs)

If something doesn't work, run ~/.local/bin/frame-voice --check and share the output.

Development

python3 -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[test]'
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen pytest

MIT licensed. Made by fuelCell.