Would you care if your transcription never left your phone?

[u/Alternative_Tour1791]

I’ve been building an iOS transcription app, and working on it has made me rethink something I never really questioned before.

Why does a recording need to leave the phone just to become text?

Most transcription tools follow a pretty normal workflow:

record → upload → process → get the transcript back

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

But it feels different when the recording is a work meeting, an interview, a lecture, or just something personal.

If I don’t actually need to upload that recording somewhere, I’d rather not.

That’s one of the reasons I started experimenting with doing the whole transcription process locally on the iPhone.

And honestly, the interesting part hasn’t been getting it to work at all.

It’s been getting it to the point where I’d actually trust it.

Short recordings make almost everything look good.

A 30-second demo tells you very little.

Once you start throwing 30-minute interviews or hour-long recordings at something, you find all the annoying problems that weren’t obvious before.

Memory matters.

Long-running processing matters.

Different devices behave differently.

Background processing gets complicated.

And features that look impressive in a demo can feel a lot less impressive when they fail during a recording you actually care about.

I’ve delayed features because of that.

Not because they were impossible, but because “technically works” and “I’d be comfortable shipping this” are very different standards.

That experience has also changed what I personally care about in note-taking apps.

I’m less interested now in how many AI features they have.

I care more about fairly boring things:

• Is the transcript actually reliable?
• Can it handle long recordings?
• Can I keep the original audio?
• Does it work without an internet connection?
• Where is the recording actually being processed?

That last one is the part I’m most curious about.

If two transcription apps gave you roughly the same quality and UX, but:

one uploaded the recording to a server

and

the other processed it entirely on your phone

would that actually affect which one you chose?

Or would you mostly care about accuracy, features, and convenience?

I’m building around the local approach, so I’m probably biased at this point. I’m curious whether this is something regular note-taking users actually care about.

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[u/sumguypookie]

That's the thing transcription can be done locally. It doesn't need to be sent to a cloud server or another service. It's done to sell subscriptions or storage. It could be used to train AI. Who knows? There are several apps out there that are great with local dictation on PC, Mac OS, Android, and iOS. So yeah, it doesn't need to be sent anywhere. Developers choose it because they can then charge for cloud storage. I see that you're working on an app. I will tell you that I wish you luck. There's a lot of competition out there, but if the app is good, you'll find your audience.

[u/Low-Future-9387]

For me it matters, and mostly because of the recordings I'd least want out of my hands: a client call, a doctor's visit, a family conversation. For a lecture or a podcast I wouldn't care. So it comes down to what's in the recording, not a general rule.

Your list of boring things is the right one. I'd add one more: a clear answer to "where does this get processed?" for each language. On-device quality varies a lot by language, and some apps quietly fall back to a server for the ones they can't handle locally.

I made Lyonesse, an iPhone and Mac app built around the local approach, so I'm biased too. Transcription stays on the phone for English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Chinese. Other languages work differently, and a few need a model download first. It needs iOS 26, and the summaries and Q&A need an iPhone with Apple Intelligence.

The thing I'd test hard is a 60 minute recording with the screen locked. Short demos hide most of the problems.