A simple, accessible and offline real-time transcription app.
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 26 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 and a zoom of up to 200 % should not break the UI. If you encounter any accessibility issues, let us know!
- Negligible battery usage: Under normal circumstances, the battery drain caused by VLT should be negligible.
Android 9+ supported.