Local Whisper vs. Cloud Dictation: Weighing Privacy, Speed and Accuracy

A developer guide argues that running Whisper locally does not automatically make dictation faster, more accurate, or fully private. It explains that dictation pipelines have two stages, speech-to-text and LLM formatting, and that either can send data off the machine even if the other stays local. Sync features such as snippets, custom vocabulary, and API keys can also expose information regardless of where audio is processed. Latency depends on hardware and connection, with cloud inference sometimes beating a large local model on older CPUs. The author recommends testing Whisper model sizes on your own voice with whisper.cpp and a word error rate comparison rather than relying on published benchmarks.