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Pixel phones have a voice recorder that works offline and does this. I've used a bootleg apk I got off xdadevs of it on my samsung phone, and it works well. But

Pixel phones have a voice recorder that works offline and does this. I've used a bootleg apk I got off xdadevs of it on my samsung phone, and it works well. But for privacy or opsec that's probably even worse than a saas option. Ostensibly almost all newer/flagship iphone/android devices can do offline speech to text with passable accuracy. On Android it is (I suspect intentionally) nerfed to an accessibility feature called "live transcribe." It transcribes everything star wars style on the screen, but you can't save the audio or the transcription, you have to copy/paste the output which just disappears when you close the app. It's arbitrary and infuriating that it's like this. I'm generally a "hater" of the cloud, and I have to admit that Otter is very good. I used it speaking with someone using airpods on a shitty internet connection, with no noticeable drop in accuracy. Even spelled uncommon last names correctly. What I don't get is why none of these free apps can take a pre-recorded audio file as the input. Even for the paid services, this seems to be more limited than using the functionality 'live.' Is there some technical reason for this, or is it a sales department decision?

habitue 5y ago
> But for privacy or opsec that's probably even worse than a saas option. Probably not, the attack vector of an apk of dubious provenance is probably that it sends all of your transcriptions to some 3rd party server. There's some non-zero probability that it does that, and it's possible you could run it in a network-less sandbox somehow to mitigate it. But with the saas service, you know for a fact it's going to a 3rd party server, who can store it for as long as they want. And if they aren't hacked now, they could be in the future.
- kadoban 5y ago
  That analysis would be a lot more compelling if it didn't assume that all 3rd parties are the same. A 3rd party sending around a sketch apk that calls back to them is _definitely_ going to try to do something bad with it. Otter is unlikely to do something bad with it (it'd be bad for their business). So you should really compare the odds otter gets hacked vs the odds the apk is compromised.
- notjulianjaynes 5y ago
  Actually, I still have the bootleg apk installed, because sometimes you've just gotta live a little, right? Also happen to have the Otter app. Just checked netguard and guess which one has connected to the internet 6 times since I last opened it.

habitue 5y ago

> But for privacy or opsec that's probably even worse than a saas option. Probably not, the attack vector of an apk of dubious provenance is probably that it sends all of your transcriptions to some 3rd party server. There's some non-zero probability that it does that, and it's possible you could run it in a network-less sandbox somehow to mitigate it. But with the saas service, you know for a fact it's going to a 3rd party server, who can store it for as long as they want. And if they aren't hacked now, they could be in the future.

kadoban 5y ago
That analysis would be a lot more compelling if it didn't assume that all 3rd parties are the same. A 3rd party sending around a sketch apk that calls back to them is _definitely_ going to try to do something bad with it. Otter is unlikely to do something bad with it (it'd be bad for their business). So you should really compare the odds otter gets hacked vs the odds the apk is compromised.
notjulianjaynes 5y ago
Actually, I still have the bootleg apk installed, because sometimes you've just gotta live a little, right? Also happen to have the Otter app. Just checked netguard and guess which one has connected to the internet 6 times since I last opened it.