Where does the AI run? On your machine — and nowhere else.
Every 'AI writing' feature raises the same question: is my text being sent to OpenAI, Google or Anthropic to be processed? For VoiceNote, the answer is no. The language model that turns your speech into polished writing runs locally, on your own computer.
The short version
VoiceNote uses two models — one to transcribe your speech, one to write it up — and both run on your device. Your words are never sent to a cloud AI provider, never used to train anyone's model, and never leave your machine. There's no API key, no account, and no prompt sitting in a log on someone else's server.
How most 'AI' features actually work
When a typical app offers 'AI' writing or summaries, it usually sends your text to a hosted large language model — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — over the internet. That means your content is transmitted off your device and becomes subject to that provider's retention and training policies. Even a reassuring "we don't train on your data" still means your data *was* sent, and *was* processed, somewhere else.
How VoiceNote is different
- Transcription runs on a local Whisper model.
- The writing and formatting run on a local Gemma model, on your own CPU.
- There is no network call to any AI provider — ever.
- It works with the internet switched off.
- There's no "bring your own API key," because there's no external API in the loop.
The honest comparison
| Typical cloud AI | VoiceNote (local) | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your text is processed | A provider's servers | Your device |
| Sent over the internet | Yes | No |
| Subject to provider retention / training | Per their policy | N/A — never sent |
| Works offline | No | Yes |
| Needs an API key or account | Usually | No |
Why we chose local, even though it's harder
Running a capable language model on-device is more engineering work, and it's why VoiceNote downloads a model on first run instead of quietly calling an API. We think it's worth it — because it's the only way to genuinely *promise* your words never leave, a promise you can check for yourself.
Related
Your words, written by a model that lives on your machine.
No cloud AI, no API keys, no prompts leaving your device.