A Developer's Take on Open Speech-to-Text Recording

Sometimes you just need a straightforward, no-frills tool that does one job well. For developers working with audio, voice interfaces, or accessibility features, that job is often capturing speech and turning it into text. While there are plenty of cloud APIs for this, having a simple, open-source tool you can run locally or build upon is a different kind of useful. That's where OSTT comes in.

It's a browser-based tool that strips the process down to its essentials: record, visualize, transcribe. No accounts, no subscriptions, just a mic and some clever JavaScript.

What It Does

OSTT (Open Speech-to-Text Tool) is a web application that lets you record your voice through the browser. As you speak, it shows a real-time volume meter, giving you immediate feedback on your audio levels. When you stop recording, it uses the Web Speech API to transcribe your speech to text directly in your browser. You can then copy that text with a single click.

Why It's Cool

The simplicity is the main attraction here. It's a focused utility that solves a specific problem without overcomplicating things. The real-time volume meter is a small but thoughtful touch—it helps you know if you're speaking clearly into the mic before you even finish recording, which is handy for troubleshooting.

From a developer's perspective, the implementation is clean and instructive. It's a great reference for how to work with the MediaRecorder API, the AudioContext API for analyzing volume, and the SpeechRecognition interface. The entire project is client-side, which makes it privacy-friendly and easy to host anywhere. It's the kind of project you can fork, tweak for your own needs (like adding a custom STT service), or just study to understand how browser-based audio handling works.

How to Try It

The easiest way is to head over to the live demo. Just open the link below in a modern browser (Chrome or Edge work best for the Web Speech API), grant microphone permissions, and start talking.

Try the Live Demo

If you want to run it locally or poke around the code, clone the repo and open index.html in a browser. No build step, no npm install—it's that simple.

git clone https://github.com/kristoferlund/ostt.git
cd ostt
# Open index.html in your browser

Final Thoughts

OSTT isn't trying to be the next big AI platform. It's a solid, practical tool that embodies the "small pieces, loosely joined" philosophy. As a developer, I appreciate projects like this. They're immediately useful, but they also serve as a clean codebase to learn from. You could use it as a quick dictation notepad, integrate its concepts into a larger app for voice notes, or adapt it as a testing ground for different speech-to-text engines. It's a reminder that not every tool needs to be complex to be effective.

Check out the repo, maybe star it if you find it handy, and see what you can build from it.

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