«Ne pishi golosovoe!» («Don’t send voice notes!») is an Android app that turns speech into text right on the phone. Your own dictations, voice messages people send you, lectures, even videos. The internet is needed once, to download the speech recognition model. After that the app works offline, with no account and no subscription, and recordings never leave the device.
A tagged notes feed and a full transcript
negolosom.ruWhy
I often dictate notes to myself on walks. In the forest near my home there’s next to no signal, and that’s exactly where ideas show up. I used to record them on a regular voice recorder and sort through them at home. I wanted a note to become text straight away, and without the internet. The backstory is in my article on vc.ru (in Russian).
How it works
A neural network recognises speech on the phone itself. Russian is handled by GigaAM v3, an open model from Sber: according to the developer’s benchmarks, it gets 8.3% of words wrong on average. Another 15 languages run on Whisper small. The app takes 30 MB, the Russian model another 214 MB. Android 7 or newer is required.
The main screen has a single red button: hold it and speak. A voice message from a messenger can be sent to the app via «Share». The finished text can be copied, shared, or saved as a file.
How it evolved
I built the first version in 2 days on React Native and released it on RuStore in April. In May I rewrote the app in native Kotlin. After that, 30–40 minute recordings started getting transcribed in full, and recognition keeps running in the background.
Since then an update ships every couple of weeks, 18 so far. They added audio and video import, search across transcripts, tags, recording from the quick settings panel without opening the app, appending to an existing note, .srt subtitles, and exporting all recordings as a ZIP archive. On long recordings the app pauses recognition while an overheated phone cools down.
The result
The app is free: no subscription and no in-app purchases, development is covered by a single ad banner. On RuStore it has a 4.9 rating and over a thousand downloads. You can get it on RuStore, or, if you don’t have it, as an APK from GitHub.
Tech: Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Material 3, Hilt, Room, Kotlin Coroutines, sherpa-onnx 1.13.2, GigaAM v3, Whisper small, Silero VAD, AppMetrica 8.5.1, Yandex Advertising Network.