Why Local Voice AI Beats Cloud APIs for Developers

If you're a developer using cloud voice APIs, you're paying a tax on every word you speak. Upload latency, per-minute pricing, and data retention policies add friction to what should be the simplest input method: your voice.

The Cloud Voice Tax

Cloud voice services like ElevenLabs, Google Cloud Speech, and Amazon Transcribe all follow the same model: upload audio, wait for processing, pay per usage. This introduces three problems:

• Latency: Network round-trips add 200ms–2s of delay. For real-time dictation, this is unacceptable.
• Cost: ElevenLabs charges $5–330/month. Google charges $0.006/15 seconds. It adds up fast for daily users.
• Privacy: Your voice audio passes through third-party servers. Most services retain audio for “quality improvement.”

Local AI Has Caught Up

Thanks to Whisper, Apple Silicon, and CoreML optimizations, local speech-to-text now matches or exceeds cloud accuracy for most languages. The key advantages:

• Zero latency: Processing happens on-device at real-time speed.
• Zero cost: After the initial purchase, every transcription is free.
• Zero uploads: Audio never leaves your machine.

The Developer Workflow

Developers have unique needs. Code dictation, commit messages, documentation, Slack replies — these all require different formatting. Cloud APIs return raw text. Local tools like Andak can use context-aware formatting to adapt output to the active application.

Dictating in VS Code? Andak formats for code comments. Composing an email? It adds proper greeting and structure. This kind of intelligence requires knowing your local context — something cloud APIs can't do.

The Math on Switching

Consider the cost of a typical cloud voice setup:

• ElevenLabs Starter: $5/month = $60/year
• ElevenLabs Pro: $22/month = $264/year
• Google Cloud Speech: ~$0.024/minute for 30 min/day = ~$22/month = $264/year

Andak is $20, once. It pays for itself in the first month of any cloud plan. And you keep your data.

When Cloud Still Wins

To be fair, cloud APIs have their place:

• Server-side processing: If your app needs to transcribe user audio on a server, you need a cloud API.
• Text-to-speech: If you need to generate voice audio (not capture it), services like ElevenLabs are purpose-built for that.
• Scale: Processing thousands of concurrent audio streams requires infrastructure.

But for personal voice input — the developer sitting at their Mac, wanting to type faster — local wins on every metric that matters.

Try Andak and experience the difference.