Local Parakeet transcription for Android, in a voice-notes app and a keyboard.
Chirp is a hobby project from a guy who sort of knows what he's doing. I'm learning Android as I go, and AI helped with a lot of it, mostly Gemini.
Speech-to-text runs on your phone. Optional cleanup sends text to the cloud provider you choose.
- Records and plays voice notes, then transcribes them locally with Parakeet.
- Works as the Chirp Voice dictation keyboard and a home-screen widget.
- Starts recording right away and keeps recoverable audio if Android interrupts the app.
- Can clean up text, make summaries, or chat about a transcript with your own API key.
- Has tags, profiles, word replacements, sharing, and Obsidian export.
Grab the APK from GitHub Releases. Chirp 4.0 needs Android 16 and uses the compact Parakeet 110M GGUF model by default.
I've only tested Chirp on a Galaxy S25 Ultra. If you try it on something else, I'd love to hear how it goes.
I'd like to try more Parakeet variants, Whisper and other speech models, local LLM cleanup on phones that can handle it, better cloud connections, easier sign-in alongside API keys, and modular ways to turn transcripts into useful stuff. Using a ChatGPT subscription would be interesting if that ever becomes an option.
I may not have the time, hardware, or skill to build all of that. I'm still curious.
Chirp's code is Apache 2.0. Credits include transcribe.cpp, ggml, KleidiAI, sherpa-onnx, ONNX Runtime, NVIDIA's Parakeet models, handy-computer's GGUF conversions, csukuangfj's ONNX conversion, models.dev, AndroidLame-kotlin, and LAME.
The full licenses and credits are in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and bundled with the APK.