Voice input is different

What you type has already been self-edited: by the time a key is pressed, you have decided what to say. Voice is different — you speak in half-formed sentences, with filler words, hesitations, and mid-course corrections. A voice input tool handles, every day, the content a user least wants recorded.

That sets the first design constraint for Ousia Voice: voice does not leave the device by default.

On-device recognition is fast enough now

A few years ago, local speech recognition was neither accurate nor fast enough to ship as a product. That has changed:

  • Models like FunASR and Whisper reach usable accuracy at moderate sizes;
  • Apple Silicon and modern x64 processors have plenty of headroom for real-time transcription;
  • Quantization and inference optimizations keep background memory and energy costs acceptable.

In our tests, the UI responds in about 12ms from shortcut press to recording state, and recognition itself runs on-device with no network round trip. For a "speak and done" input flow, the local path is actually the faster one.

Connected features are options, not defaults

Local-first does not mean refusing the cloud. Cloud high-accuracy recognition and AI text cleanup are still valuable for complex audio and long meetings, so they exist as options:

You enable them explicitly in settings when you need them. Otherwise, Ousia Voice simply transcribes on your device.

Accounts exist only for subscriptions and sync. Recordings and transcript history are not saved by default. These rules sound mundane, but together they answer one question: who does this tool work for.

The engineering cost

Local-first is not free. Model distribution makes the installer larger (the current macOS build is about 125MB), performance varies across chips and needs per-platform tuning, and offline dictionaries and model updates need their own channel. We think it is a price worth paying — an input tool sits closer to the person than almost any other software, and it should get trust right first.

If you are interested in the engineering details, write to us at support@ousiaai.com.