Cloud or Local Speech-to-Text? We Built the Same App Both Ways. Here's What We Learnt.
One Electron app, two modes, one interface. What a two-day hackathon build taught us about on-device diarization, CoreML and DirectML, read against a production on-device engine.
At this year's internal hackathon, our esteemed colleagues Georgios Hadjiharalambous and Stuart Wood set out to build Inkwell, a dictation app centered around high-accuracy and speaker-aware note-taking, powered by Speechmatics speech-to-text.
Nothing too unusual there.
What makes Inkwell worth writing about is the decision they made early on: the app would run in two modes, cloud and fully local, behind one identical interface.
Flip a toggle, and the same Electron UI talks to either a realtime cloud endpoint or a speech recognition engine running entirely on the laptop in front of you, no network required after install.
That second mode is obviously the interesting one. "Local Whisper works" is a solved problem developers stopped being impressed by two years ago. What's still mostly undocumented...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to hackernoon.com. To see the full text click HERE
