A simple, accessible and offline real-time transcription app for Android.
It's true that many apps are capable of transcribing speech to text; increasingly, even mobile operating systems offer options to recognize speech in the vicinity and transcribe it. In our experience, though, there usually are one or more of the following caveats:
- The transcription only works if an internet connection exists,
- The transcript's quality is too poor,
- The app isn't accessible to the deaf-blind, i.e., not optimised for braille display users,
- The user interface is too complicated due to supporting more features than plain transcription of speech,
- Continuous transcribing isn't supported (e.g., pressing a button to restart transcribing is necessary),
- Transcribing imposes a significant drain on the device's battery,
- The transcription service costs money or processes potentially sensitive audio data in the cloud.
VLT is our answer to these caveats.
- Continuous transcription: Once started, the transcription keeps running until stopped by the user.
- Completely offline: VLT uses VOSK to recognize and transcribe the speech on the user's device.
- Sufficiently accurate: The utilized small VOSK models offer a solid compromise between size of the models, memory usage and accuracy of the transcript; using noise-cancelling external microphones can improve the transcript accuracy farther.
- Only what's needed: All small VOSK models (currently 27 different languages) are supported and can get downloaded as needed; they remain on the device persistently until the app gets uninstalled.
- Free and Open-Source: The app is licensed under the Apache license, version 2.0.
- Accessibility front and center: VLT is completely accessible for braille display users and supports light and dark theme; the font sizes can get adjusted directly in the app settings. However, the UI interface isn't optimized for visually yet, because I'm blind myself. If you encounter any accessibility issues, let us know!
- Negligible battery usage: Under normal circumstances, the battery drain caused by VLT should be negligible.