Vibe Coding a Wispr Clone in 20 minutes

Here’s the github repo.

The best part of Wispr Flow’s new Android app, is the persistent bubble overlaying all apps.

Being a GrapheneOS user… I can’t get over letting them read all the text on all my screens at all times.

I asked about the Privacy Mode feature in their official subreddit:

Asked a follow up… and silence

Even if they claim to delete everything, there’s so many sub processors getting data in these sorts of pipelines, and all I really need is local transcription.

I’ve been using voice ink on my Mac for months over Wispr, because it works more than good enough for the types of ways I use it, without any AI processing on top of the transcription.

I speak in a sentence or two at a time, not giant chunks.

Anyways I’ve always wanted the same thing for my phone as I have on mac: local voice to text that is fast and accurate.

So I spent 20 minutes, seriously that’s about it. And now we have this:

The part that I built is the purple bubble. It shows anytime you have text fields focused on Android. Tap and hold to transcribe, and then it pastes when you let go.

You could adjust this app to run whisper locally, however I find that to be too slow. I run whisper v3 large, which is about 1.5gb in ram on a 4070 gpu that I have.

I made the app use the Home Assistant Wyoming protocol, which is just a small layer describing how to send the voice and text info back and forth. The app lets you put in the server url and you’re all set after enabling a couple permissions.

I access this over Tailscale so it’s my private transcription service that always works even on cellular.

Ultra fast vibe coding iterations

The reason I was able to build this so fast? I enable wireless debugging on Android and then let claude connect and run it. First try, the speech bubble didn’t work because of a bad api request / response parsing by the code.

Since it can install right to my phone and view adb logs, I barely tell it what isn’t working and it iterates for me.

Here’s when I told it the transcript wasn’t being returned for example:

Anyways, hope you like this idea. I made the github repo auto build the apk if anyone else wants to use it.

This wyoming server works perfectly with Home Assistant’s voice assistant feature too so you can have your own Siri that has vastly smarter functionality and better natural language than most standard platforms. Those platforms also take all your voice data and have had leaks an accidental retention in the past.

From now on I only use private AI assistants for accessing all my smart home setup and data. Look out for my next posts about Home assistant and some insane AI and reverse engineering I’ve been doing soon.