ThumbFree: open-source offline voice typing with on-phone Parakeet, sub-second latency
Affectionate-Top7058 · reddit · 2026-11-10
A developer released ThumbFree, a free, Apache 2.0 open-source voice typing app for Android and iPhone that runs NVIDIA's Parakeet 0.6B speech model entirely on-device — after a one-time 0.5-0.7 GB model download it works in airplane mode, with no accounts, ads, or analytics.
- On Android, a bubble appears next to any text box; tap, talk, tap again. On a Pixel 10 text lands in 0.7-0.9s even after 30s of speech.
- On iPhone it ships as a keyboard with a mic key; since iOS keyboards can't use the microphone, the first tap of each session briefly opens the app.
- English by default, a second model covers 25 European languages; requires Android 13+ or iOS 26+.
The author is also experimenting with on-device small models (Gemini Nano on Pixel, Apple's built-in model) to clean filler words and self-corrections — not yet shipped.
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