Cloud subscriptions are not the only answer
Speech-to-text has become a standard feature in most productivity tools. But nearly all solutions require a cloud subscription, send audio data to external servers, and lock the user into a specific provider. For many businesses, this is an unnecessary dependency.
HAVEN Intelligence built localdictate to demonstrate that the same result can be achieved locally, without subscriptions, without telemetry, and with full control over data.
Whisper on standard hardware
OpenAI’s Whisper is one of the best open source models for speech-to-text. The challenge has been that the larger models require significant compute power. This has changed with faster-whisper, a CTranslate2-based implementation that uses int8 quantization to reduce both memory usage and inference time substantially.
In practice, this means that even the medium Whisper model runs smoothly on a laptop without a dedicated GPU. localdictate offers five quality tiers, from the tiny model at 336 MB to the large model at 3 GB, so users can choose the right balance between accuracy and speed.
Privacy as the default
When audio data is sent to a cloud service, privacy depends on the provider’s policies and infrastructure. With local inference, the question is irrelevant. The audio recording is processed on the user’s machine, and the transcribed text never leaves the device.
For businesses handling confidential information, this is not a nice-to-have but a requirement. localdictate demonstrates that this requirement can be met without compromising quality.
Practical usage
localdictate runs as a system tray application with a global hotkey. The workflow is simple: press the hotkey, speak, and text appears at the cursor in the active application. No window switching, no copying, no extra steps.
This simplicity is intentional. Many AI tools suffer from feature bloat and complex setup. localdictate focuses on a single task and does it well. This reflects HAVEN Intelligence’s approach to AI in general: tools should be practical, accessible, and solve real problems.
Conclusion
Local AI is not an alternative to cloud services in every situation. But for speech-to-text, where privacy matters and where a stable solution without subscriptions has value, it is a superior approach.
localdictate is open source and available on GitHub. It is free to use, and the source code is available for anyone who wants to adapt it to their own needs.