At NobodyWho , we've spent the last months shipping new features, like Speech-to-Text or Voice Activity Detection, to complete our local AI stack, and now felt like a good time to run a few experiments with our software.

I decided to build a simple transcription app with React Native that you can use fully offline once you have downloaded the whisper model (small, int8 quantization). With this app, you can easily record 10+ minutes of English speech and save either the entire transcript or just the parts you are interested in. Let's take a closer look at the implementation and see how it compares to a cloud transcription service.

Recording and transcription

The interface is straightforward: a button to start the recording and a timer, with the first sentences appearing as soon as they are processed.…