Building My Own Local AI Dictation Tool
I use voice-to-text constantly. I dictate prompts when working with AI, draft longer thoughts when typing feels too slow, and fire off messages to friends without forcing my thumbs through several paragraphs on a phone. The technology for this is not new, but the experience has often felt strangely compromised. Many transcription tools want another subscription. Others send audio to a closed-model API, which introduces a recurring cost and means trusting yet another service with my voice recordings. Even when a product works well, I am usually adapting my workflow to whatever its developers decided to build. Recently, I tried a different approach: I built the version I wanted for myself. It runs locally on my Windows computer, activates from a keyboard shortcut, and all it uses is an NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti with 8 GB of VRAM – no special Mac M5 chips or top of the line gaming cards. The everyday transcription path is fast enough that I barely think about it. When it makes a mistake, a second shortcut I’ve created reprocesses the saved audio with a more capable model and replaces the original text. This article, fittingly, began as a voice transcription using that system.