Dictave
Blog · Text
Aeroplane mode is a feature
Switch your wi-fi off and Dictave does not degrade, apologise, or ask you to reconnect. Nothing changes at all. That is not stoicism. It is the design.
Most modern software treats the network as oxygen: without it, features grey out, spinners spin, and eventually an error explains that the thing you bought cannot currently do the thing it is for. We have all learned to accept this, the way people once accepted that a television needed the whole street's aerial to co-operate.
Dictation is a strange thing to build that way. Your voice is produced an arm's length from your own processor — a machine, these days, of staggering capability — and the text needs to travel roughly thirty centimetres, to the cursor. Routing that journey through a building in another country is not an engineering necessity. It is a business model wearing an engineering costume.
Building for offline first pays for itself three times over. Privacy is the obvious one: words that never leave cannot leak, be subpoenaed, retained, or fed to something. Reliability is the second: the train tunnel, the flight, the café wi-fi that lies about working — none of it is your problem. The third is subtler: latency stops being weather. When there is no round trip, the time between speaking and seeing text is a property of the software, so it can be promised, measured, and kept — rather than hoped for on behalf of the internet between you and a server.
There is a simple test for any tool that handles something personal: what does it do in aeroplane mode? Products answer with silence, excuses or a login wall. The right answer is that nothing changes. It is worth asking of everything on your machine — including, and especially, ours.