{"slug": "fast-local-and-offline-dictation", "title": "Fast, local, and offline dictation", "summary": "A developer discovered that VS Code's latest release includes a local speech-to-text model (Nemotron) and used Sherpa-ONNX to build a standalone dictation tool. The tool runs entirely locally, is fast and accurate, and the developer plans to release it to save others time.", "body_md": "Finally found the local speech-to-text model I have been looking for!\n\nIn the latest release of VS Code, I noticed they included a local model (Nemotron) for giving voice commands to your AI agent. After researching it a bit, I discovered the backend uses a very small model that runs entirely locally without heavy lifting.\n\nI learned that Sherpa-ONNX can run these models, so I asked my AI agent to build a simple tool I can trigger with a keyboard shortcut to dictate text directly into my computer. Right now, I am amazed by the results-it is fast and accurate.\n\nAfter some polish, I plan to release this as a standalone tool. I know everyone \"could\" build this themselves, but that's still labor you have to put in. Hopefully, releasing it will save a few hours of your time.\n\nCheck out the quick demo below to see its speed and accuracy in action.\n\nDemo uses the parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-onnx model but nemotron works well too.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fast-local-and-offline-dictation", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/codisfy/fast-local-and-offline-dictation-22f3", "published_at": "2026-08-01 01:55:26+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-01 02:38:48.274168+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "natural-language-processing", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["VS Code", "Nemotron", "Sherpa-ONNX", "parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-onnx"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fast-local-and-offline-dictation", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fast-local-and-offline-dictation.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fast-local-and-offline-dictation.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/fast-local-and-offline-dictation.jsonld"}}