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Hotkey Permissions on Linux

Grant Spokenly access to the keyboard devices so the dictation shortcut and text insertion work in every app.

Spokenly reads the dictation shortcut straight from the input devices, so it works in any app on both X11 and Wayland. This needs read access to /dev/input/event* and read and write access to /dev/uinput. Without it Spokenly falls back to an X11 listener that only sees the shortcut while a Spokenly window is focused, and text cannot be inserted into other apps.

The deb and rpm packages install a udev rule that grants this access. The AppImage cannot, so add the rule by hand.

Add the udev rule

Create the rule file

Create /etc/udev/rules.d/70-spokenly.rules with these two lines:

SUBSYSTEM=="input", KERNEL=="event*", TAG+="uaccess"
KERNEL=="uinput", SUBSYSTEM=="misc", TAG+="uaccess", GROUP="input", MODE="0660", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput"

Apply it

No reboot needed:

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo modprobe uinput && sudo udevadm trigger

Restart Spokenly

Quit Spokenly and start it again. The shortcut now works while any app is focused.

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