An Android keyboard that listens without phoning home

What it does

whisperIME is an Android Input Method Editor (IME) that uses OpenAI’s Whisper for speech recognition. It plugs into any text field as a keyboard input, can act as a standalone transcription and translation app, and also registers itself as a system-wide RecognitionService for apps that call the speech recognizer via intent. After a one-time ~435 MB model download from Hugging Face, it works entirely offline.

The interesting bit

The project is essentially a careful packaging job—gluing together the Whisper TFLite runtime, an Android VAD library, and the IME/RecognitionService APIs—but the payoff is genuine privacy. The most unusual detail is the author’s upfront warning that Google’s 2026/2027 identity-verification requirements for certified Android devices will force them to abandon the Play Store ecosystem entirely, making this a piece of software with a known expiration date on standard hardware.

Key highlights

• Runs as an IME, a standalone app, or a system RecognitionService via RecognizerIntent.
• Transcribes offline after downloading one of two TFLite models (fast English-only or slower multi-lingual).
• Standalone mode can translate supported languages into English.
• Supports voice activity detection and automatic recording modes, capped at 30 seconds per utterance.
• Distributed on F-Droid and OpenAPK under an MIT license.

Caveats

• On some devices, enabling it as the default system voice input requires running an adb shell command because OEM skins hide third-party recognizers; the README spells out the exact incantation.
• The project will cease to function on certified Android devices after Google’s 2026/2027 identity disclosure mandate takes effect, because the developer explicitly refuses to comply.

Verdict

Worth installing if you treat voice data as confidential and prefer F-Droid; skip it if you need real-time streaming transcription or Google-level latency.