Speech to Text

If you keep an archive long enough, the same thing ends up in it twice. The copies rarely have the same name. They are hard to spot by eye, and even harder once one copy has a transcript and the other doesn’t. The Need: Two Copies That Don’t Look Like Copies I run a small, password-protected site at home for one teacher’s recorded lectures. Each episode has audio, video, and (for most of them) a searchable transcript. It lives on my NAS and is sorted into year tabs. ...

Not every recording I transcribe is a Bible teaching or a home video. Some of it is confidential — calls from a counseling hotline, where people are talking about the hardest thing in their life. That kind of audio can’t go anywhere near a paid cloud API. Not because of cost. Because it isn’t mine to send anywhere. That ruled out Whisper’s API and ElevenLabs — the two services I’d already used and paid for — for this particular kind of file. I needed something that would run entirely on my own PC, touch nothing outside it, and cost nothing per file. My PC has no GPU. Whatever I built had to live with that too. ...

My wife listens to a Bible teacher every morning. After I built her an app to make that easier (the first post in this series), she asked for one more thing. It turned out to be the hardest part of the project. Could we also read his teachings, she said, not just hear them? Reading helps her study. She wanted the words on a screen. “Sure,” I thought. “I’ll just turn the audio into text.” How hard could it be? In 2026, turning speech into text is mostly a solved problem. ...