Most "private" dictation apps still send your voice to a server. OpenWispr downloads a Whisper-class speech model once, then transcribes on your phone from then on — network or no network.
Among Android dictation apps, few clearly combine free, open-source, and confirmed on-device processing in one product. Typeless, for example, ships a real Android keyboard with dictation, but multiple independent reviewers report it is cloud-only with no local mode — despite marketing copy ("Zero cloud data retention," "On-device history storage") that reads as local. It's also closed source and costs $12–30/month for its Pro tier after an 8,000-words/week free cap.
Other Android dictation apps exist whose on-device-vs-cloud architecture for the Android build specifically isn't documented anywhere we could verify — so this page won't name them as cloud-based when we can't confirm it, and it won't claim OpenWispr is the only genuinely on-device option, either. What we can say plainly: OpenWispr's Android app makes no network calls to transcribe, and the source is public so that's a checkable claim, not a marketing one.
On first launch, OpenWispr downloads a Whisper-class speech model to your device (currently Whisper small, about 488 MB). After that one-time download, transcription and text cleanup both run on-device — put your phone in airplane mode and dictation keeps working exactly the same, because there's nowhere for it to fail over to a server.
This isn't a toggle you have to remember to turn on. There is no cloud path in the app to switch to — the architecture is local by construction, the same way it is on the macOS build.
On-device models are a real engineering tradeoff, not a free lunch: they're typically slower to start and less accurate at the extreme edges than a large cloud model with unlimited compute behind it. OpenWispr ships a right-sized model rather than the largest possible one, to keep the on-device experience usable on a phone rather than a data center.
OpenWispr's Android app is also younger than incumbents like Wispr Flow or Typeless — expect a smaller feature set today (see the comparison pages linked below for specifics on where OpenWispr is still catching up, like failure-recovery UX).
Open source and entirely on your device. Install from Google Play on Android, or download the macOS app from GitHub Releases — no account, no sign-up.