Utter

On the Mac, Spokenly lets you dictate anywhere with your own API key. On Android there was nothing like it I trusted: every option wanted a subscription, an account, or my voice on its own servers.

I wanted something small that runs on my own key and never loses a sentence, even when the network drops.

• 01
  The market splits into two bad options

  Polished dictation apps (Wispr Flow-style) are subscription and cloud-account products. The free alternatives are keyboard replacements, which means giving up the keyboard you already like.

• 02
  Dictation has to fit the sentence

  Raw transcripts arrive capitalised with a full stop. Inserted mid-sentence, that reads wrong, so Utter matches case and punctuation to the text around the cursor.

• 03
  Speech models hallucinate on silence

  Whisper invents text on near-silent clips. A hallucination filter and a faithfulness guard on the polish step are covered by unit tests.

• 04
  Android fights overlay apps

  MIUI and HyperOS kill background overlays, and Android 13 greys out accessibility for sideloaded apps. Setup had to walk people through both.

1. Capture 16 kHz audio from a hand-drawn Canvas bubble docked above the keyboard.
2. Transcribe with Whisper large-v3-turbo on your own Groq key, with a personal dictionary for names and jargon.
3. Clean up the text: remove filler words, resolve self-corrections, handle spoken punctuation and lists.
4. Insert it through accessibility, matched to the sentence around the cursor.
5. Log locally: words, WPM, streak, time saved and a 7-day chart. Failed uploads are kept for retry.

• 01
  One moving part

  The interface is flat and static. The only thing that animates is the bubble, because it's the only thing you look at while talking.

• 02
  States you can read without looking

  Idle, listening, hands-free, cancel armed, processing, done, copied and error each have a distinct silhouette, not just a colour change.

• 03
  Near-black ink, one red signal

  Red means exactly one thing, “recording”, so it's never used for decoration.

• 04
  Mono labels in brackets

  Geist Mono in [brackets] for system text and Instrument Serif italics for voice. The type tells you whether you're reading the app or reading yourself.

Crops from the Utter Figma file, which I translated from the shipping Kotlin rather than the other way round.

Ship a public build. Right now Utter is installed over USB so that Android's restricted-settings block doesn't apply. After that, an on-device Whisper fallback so it works with no key at all.