To prepare minutes I recorded a not-for-profit board meeting this week - ninety minutes, soft audio, everything sensitive - and let Google’s new Eloquent convert it locally. Nothing touched a cloud server. Eleven thousand words, on-device, done.
The original Voice Memos recording on my iPhone was quite soft. Board meetings are what they are. But Eloquent handled it better than I expected - the transcript came back clean, the filler words and false starts were stripped out, and I had a working draft of the minutes within a short time. Further refinement with GPT-5.5 and the final document was done. (Yes I am flirting with other models. Anthropic token inflation is becoming an issue - a topic for another day).
What Eloquent actually is
Eloquent is Google’s free, offline-first AI dictation app for iOS and macOS. It runs on-device using your choice of Gemma 4 2B or Gemma 4 12B - smaller and faster versus larger and more capable - to clean up speech as you go, removing filler words, fixing false starts, producing something closer to finished prose than a raw transcript. It also carries a personal vocabulary feature, where you can import your own terms and names to improve recognition. No subscription, no usage cap.
On iOS only you can enable cloud-assisted processing for richer rewrite modes - key points, formal, short, long versions of the same dictation. When offline mode is on, those presets aren’t available, but the core cleanup and transcription stay local. On MacOS it all operates locally.
Where it falls short
Eloquent is not quite as consistently slick as Wispr Flow, which remains the gold standard for dictation. The workflow is smoother with Wispr Flow, and the output is more polished across a wider range of inputs.
The most notable rough edge: those text transformation modes didn’t cope with ninety minutes of audio and 11,000 words. That’s a real gap. Transforming a long meeting capture into structured key points is exactly the use case offline processing should own. Having that fall over on long-form content is something Google needs to fix.
So I’m not cancelling Wispr Flow yet. More extended use and testing to come.
Tech-Darwinism
That said, the direction is clear enough. A$16 a month is a hard thing to justify for life* when an equivalent service is available for free, works 100% offline, and keeps sensitive recordings entirely on-device.
- For life - I am not being dramatic here. Any sufficiently good SAAS (Software As A Service) will build a dependency which you will pay for month after month, year after year. You will keep paying forever, or until something better comes along. Yes I’ve heard the line “For less than a cup of coffee a week” - I’ve used it myself when I was marketing software 14 years ago. But it all adds up.
It’s a shame to watch. Wispr Flow is a well-made product from a small team. But this is Tech-Darwinism - the same pattern we’ve seen play out across notes apps, to-do managers, email clients and a dozen other categories. A large platform ships something good enough, free and vertically integrated, and the economics shift overnight. The little guys rarely survive it, even when their product is better.
Eloquent isn’t the finished article. For straight transcription, personal capture and short-form dictation it’s already compelling. For long-form meetings and document transformation, give it a version or two.
Also keep an eye on Google. They start lots of product ideas only to abandon them at some point. A ready example is the long missed Google Reader. Here is a list of 100 products Google has shutdown.
The clock on that monthly subscription is ticking either way.
Sources:
- Google AI Edge Eloquent - Google
- Eloquent on the App Store - Apple
- Google launches an offline AI dictation app on iOS - CNET
- Google AI Edge Eloquent app - 9to5Google
- Wispr Flow - Wispr