The paper describes a distributed online speech-to-text system. The main features of the system are real-time speech recognition and full-duplex user experience, meaning that the partially recognized utterance is progressively displayed to the user during speaking. Other benefits include easy client-server communication protocol and system scalability to many concurrent user sessions. The paper also describes two Estonian speech-to-text applications based on the developed frame-work: a general-domain dictation application with an estimated word error rate of 26.4% and a radiology report dictation system with a word error rate of 13.7%. The system is open-source and based on free software.