Dictation that works offline

Why most dictation stops when the internet does

Most dictation apps record your voice, send it over the internet to a server, turn it into text there, and send the text back. That's why they stop on a plane, go slow on bad Wi-Fi, and why everything you say passes through someone else's computer first. I found that out when the Wi-Fi dropped mid-sentence and the app I was using just stopped.

How murmrrr does it instead

The speech recognition runs on your computer's own processor or graphics chip. The first time you open murmrrr it downloads its speech model once (about 190 MB, or 1.2 GB for the high-accuracy one on an NVIDIA card or an Apple chip). After that, dictation needs no connection at all: on a train, on a plane, in a field, on a laptop in a café with no password.

What the internet is still used for

Being honest about this matters more than a tidy headline:

• Downloading murmrrr and fetching the speech model on first launch.
• Updates, which it checks for in the background.
• The licence check. murmrrr confirms your licence or free trial with murmrrr.com about once a day when it can, and needs to reach it at least once every 7 days. Dictation itself never needs the connection; after 7 days without any, it pauses until it can check again.

Nothing you say is part of any of that. Audio never leaves the computer and is never saved, and the text of your last 50 dictations stays in a file on your machine that you can clear whenever you like. The privacy policy says this in full.

What offline means for a week away

Open murmrrr once while you're online, and it will dictate for the next 7 days with no connection at all. Draft the chapter at 30,000 feet, write the emails on the train, and they'll send when you're back online.