Scrib

July 11, 2026 · View on GitHub

On-device voice transcription for Android. Your audio never leaves your phone.

Scrib turns speech into text entirely on your device, using open Whisper speech models. Nothing is uploaded — the app only goes online to download a model you choose.

Two ways to use it

Transcribe your own audio. Pick any audio file on your phone and get the text, right in the app, fully offline.
A transcription engine for other apps. Scrib also runs in the background. Apps that support it — such as Forkgram — can turn a voice message into text through Scrib, on your device. In that app's settings, choose Scrib as the offline transcriber.

Scrib transcribes with open Whisper speech models. Download one on the main screen, or pick your language and Scrib fetches a suitable one. Larger models are more accurate but slower and bigger to download; keep several and switch any time. You can also add any whisper.cpp-compatible GGML model by direct link, or import a .bin from your device.

Models are downloaded separately and are not bundled in the app.

For developers

Any app can use Scrib as an offline transcriber through the open Open Transcribe contract (org.opentranscribe.api) — a small AIDL service, no SDK and no network. The contract is vendor-neutral, so apps aren't tied to Scrib: they can bind any compatible transcriber the user has installed. See CONTRACT.md.

Building

The native transcription library is compiled from the bundled whisper.cpp submodule via CMake and the NDK, so clone with submodules:

git clone --recurse-submodules <repo-url>
cd scrib
./gradlew :app:assembleRelease

Requirements: Android SDK 35, NDK 27, CMake. minSdk 26, arm64-v8a.

Privacy

Transcription runs 100% on device. Your voice messages never leave your phone. The only network access is downloading a speech model you pick, over HTTPS.

License

Scrib is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.