Google’s free offline dictation app just made paying $15 a month for Wispr Flow hard to justify
April 6, 2026 – 9:07 pm
In short:
Google has quietly released an iOS app called Google AI Edge Eloquent, a free, offline-first voice dictation tool that transcribes speech in real time, strips filler words automatically, and transforms raw dictation into polished text without requiring an internet connection.
How it works
Opening Eloquent presents a dictation interface with a live waveform. As you speak, the app transcribes in real time. When you pause or stop, it automatically processes the raw speech: filler words, “um”, “ah”, and similar verbal placeholders are removed, and the surrounding text is smoothed into readable prose. The cleaned transcript is copied to the clipboard automatically, ready to paste wherever it is needed.
A toggle in the top-right corner switches between two processing modes. In fully offline mode, all audio stays on the device and is processed by the Gemma-based ASR model locally; nothing is sent to a server. In cloud mode, the speech recognition still begins on-device, but Gemini models handle the text cleanup in the cloud. This distinction matters for privacy-sensitive contexts: users in regulated industries or anyone wary of uploading voice data to a remote server have a credible fully local option.
The feature set
Beyond the core transcription, Eloquent includes four text transformation tools:
- "Key points": Extracts the main ideas from the dictation as a bulleted list.
- "Formal": Rewrites the transcript in a more professional register.
- "Short": Condenses the transcript.
- "Long": Expands the transcript.
A history tab retains a log of all previous transcripts, and a personal vocabulary dictionary can import frequently used words directly from a user’s recent Gmail history.
An Android version is referenced in the App Store listing but has not yet appeared on Google Play.