The card is a clone. Its PCI vendor ID is 0x8888 – not a registered vendor, just four eights, the fingerprint of hardware built to look like something it isn’t. lspci calls it a “Silicon Magic AVMatrix VC12 4K HDMI Capture.” It’s a cheap 4K HDMI capture card in the lineage of a Magewell Pro Capture, and it had sat dead in one of my machines since I bought it, because the only Linux driver I could find for it didn’t work.
Speech-to-text is one of the few accessibility tools where Linux still lags. The options that exist tend to want a commercial cloud API, a Python toolchain with GPU model files, or an X11 session – and often all three. I wanted something that runs as a single static binary on Wayland, talks to whatever ASR backend I already have, and doesn’t listen until I tell it to.
dicta is that: a Linux/Wayland voice dictation daemon written in pure Go. No always-on microphone, no wakeword, no push-to-talk. Capture starts when you press a key and stops when the session ends.