Speech to text, Voice typing is cool.
F-droid lists opensource apps that support Whisper and Vosk models.
Futo voice is not opensource, but is source available.
It’s good for English. For my mother tongue, Malayalam, the support seems to be underdeveloped currently.
Handy seems to be good for Windows, but have not used it much.
Then for Translations:
https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.davidv.translator/
Using Mozilla’s translation Models. A good enough offline and Open source alternative to GTranslate.
Are there other cool uses of offline ML/AI that you know?
Occasionally I’ll spin it up on my local machine and have a chat with it about technical stuff.
Sometimes it’s fun just running scenarios with it because it’s novel. Or I use duck.ai kinda like an instruction manual you can ask things to. Never ever on anything with actual stakes.
I do find it’s good at deciphering Linux stuff, and I do end up actually learning rather than just blindly trusting whatever it spits out.
I don’t want chatbots to replace friends asking each other things or discussing technical topics on forums though. That would be sad. But sometimes it helps with those simple “been asked a thousand times” issues where I’d get bogged down reading 15 tabs and still not be certain what the best move could be.
So I guess I find it good at distilling existing information.
Using it to “create” anything though? As an artist and game dev, I find the thought genuinely disgusting. I suck at coding, but I’m not selling out my coder brethren and sistren to a machine, just like I’d be disappointed in them doing the same to me as an artist.