Getting Started with Veena: First Transcription in 5 Minutes

Veena is a speech to text app that runs entirely on your device: free, no account, no cloud, fully offline. It records your voice and transcribes it locally with a bundled model, so nothing is uploaded anywhere. If you can tap a microphone button and speak, you can get your first transcript in about five minutes.

Here is the whole flow, step by step.

What you need

Veena runs on Android and iOS phones, and on Windows, macOS, and Linux computers. You do not need an account, a login, or an internet connection for transcription. You need a device, a quiet-ish room, and something to say.

Step 1: Install Veena

On your phone, install the Veena app from the Android or iOS app store. On a computer, install the desktop app for Windows, macOS, or Linux.

That is the whole installation: there is no signup flow to click through afterwards. Open the app and you are at the recorder.

Step 2: Pick your language

Veena’s recognition engine covers all 22 scheduled languages of India, and each language has its own vocabulary and decoding tuned for it. How you select the language depends on your platform.

On the mobile app, the model ships with the app, so you can start recording immediately. On the desktop app, you download the model for the language you dictate in, choosing between accuracy and speed: larger models are more accurate and slower, smaller models are faster and lighter. If you dictate long documents, download the accurate model; if you dictate quick notes on an older laptop, the faster model is fine.

Set the app to the language you will actually speak. If you are dictating in Hindi, use the Hindi model, not the English one. For the full list, see the speech to text hub.

Step 3: Allow microphone permission

The first time you record, your phone or computer asks for microphone access. Allow it. This is the only permission Veena asks for: no contacts, no location, no account, no storage scares. The app needs the microphone because recording audio is the whole job.

Step 4: Record

Tap the microphone and speak. Veena records 16 kHz mono audio, which is a clean, compact signal for speech recognition, and transcribes it locally.

The mobile app offers two modes. Use hold-to-record when you want a short burst: hold the button while you speak and release when you finish. Use tap-to-record for longer dictation: tap once to start, tap again to stop. If the last recording did not come out as intended, you can replay it to check what was captured.

Step 5: Review and edit

Your transcript appears in an editable text box. Read it once, fix names and numbers, and add the punctuation the recognizer missed. On the desktop app you can also enable optional post-processing, like filler-word removal, so “um” and “uh” never land in the text, plus custom-word correction for words you use often.

Step 6: Copy or share

When the text is right, copy it to the clipboard or share it with the app of your choice: your notes app, email, a chat, a document. On mobile, pasting the clipboard into your notes app is the standard finishing move.

The desktop paste-into-app flow

The desktop app is where Veena feels most like a keyboard replacement. Instead of opening a recorder window, you use push-to-talk or a global shortcut from any application. Speak, and the transcript is pasted directly into the app you are using, whether that is a word processor, an email draft, or a form. No switching windows, no copy-paste dance, no upload.

The desktop app also keeps a recording history with search and retention settings, so past dictations are findable and their storage is under your control. Everything stays keyboard-driven, which is how fast writers like to work.

Tips for a clean first transcription

A few things make the first run go well:

• Find a quiet place. Background noise is the main cause of transcription errors.
• Speak at a steady, natural pace. Not rushed, not robotic.
• Say punctuation out loud: “full stop”, “comma”, “question mark”.
• Avoid switching languages mid-sentence. One language per recording gives the model its best chance.

What Veena does not do

A few honest notes so there are no surprises. Transcription itself is fully on-device, but Veena is not a cloud suite: there is no account sync, no cloud backup of recordings, and no built-in AI rewriting. The desktop app has optional post-processing features, and an optional LLM post-processing step exists, but it requires you to configure your own API provider, so it is not something that runs by default or for free. For everyday use, the transcription is the product: fast, local, private text.

Next steps

That is the whole loop: install, pick a language, allow the microphone, record, edit, copy or share. On desktop, add the global shortcut and the paste-into-app flow becomes your daily driver.

Want the deeper picture? Read how Veena works, meet the project and its makers, or browse the language pages to see what dictation sounds like in your language: Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, and the rest of the 22 on the speech to text hub.