Private voice notes with on-device AI transcription

Privacy by construction

Not privacy as a checkbox. Privacy as the architecture.

The most sensitive thing you produce, your voice, never has to leave the device. Transcription, clean-up, summaries, local chat and Quick Tasks run on Apple hardware first, and keep working offline.

No tracking

No analytics SDK, no behavioral profiles, no hidden telemetry.

On-device AI

Parakeet, Nemotron, WhisperKit and Gemma run locally on your device.

Polish first

Built around real Polish transcription, not English-only assumptions.

Your Mac as compute

Local pairing opens an iPhone-plus-Mac workflow with no cloud backend.

What it does

One voice workspace. Four Apple surfaces.

Capture on iPhone or Watch. Process on device. Understand and chat locally. Continue on Mac.

Capture

Record & Transcribe

Record a thought or import old audio files and turn them into clean text on your device, in 13 languages. No per-minute fees.

Quick Tasks

Dictate a task and let VAYS structure the title, notes and category, right on the device.

From your wrist

Capture a thought on Apple Watch and it lands in your library automatically. Nothing to set up.

Understand

Local Chat

Ask questions about your notes with Gemma running locally. No account, no cloud round-trip.

Summaries & Refine

Get structured summaries, and on Mac refine only the shaky passages while the confident text stays untouched.

Speaker diarization Mac

See who said what, label speakers and build a private on-device voice library. iPhone detects speakers too; the full panel lives on Mac.

Own your data

Cross-device sync

Notes captured on iPhone or Watch appear on your Mac through local Bonjour pairing, with no server in between.

Backup & Restore Mac

Export your memos, recordings, voice library and chats into a single archive you control.

Export anywhere

Take any transcript out as plain text, Markdown for Obsidian, SRT or WebVTT subtitles, or JSON. Your notes are never locked in.

Where it runs

Free on your phone. One-time on your Mac.

iPhone and iPad are free, with an optional tip jar. The Mac app is a single one-time purchase: the full desktop toolkit, no subscription, nothing else you need to buy.

iPhone & iPad

Free

Record, transcribe & import audio
Quick Tasks & Local Chat
On-device, no account

App Store

Mac

One-time · 79.99 PLN

Everything on iPhone, on a bigger canvas
Speaker diarization & voice library
Live Translation, Presenter & Backup

Mac App Store

Apple Watch

Included

Capture a thought from your wrist
Syncs into your library
Nothing to set up

Because the AI runs on your device, VAYS works best on a recent iPhone or iPad and an Apple Silicon Mac.

Why VAYS

The voice apps everyone names, and where VAYS is different.

An honest, side-by-side look at VAYS next to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper and Whisper Notes. If you are looking for a private alternative to cloud transcription tools like Otter.ai, start with where the audio goes.

	VAYS	Wispr Flowcloud dictation	SuperwhisperMac/iOS · local by default	Whisper Noteson-device
Processing	On your device	Cloud	On your device	On your device
Works fully offline
No account required
Polish-first transcription	Built for it	Multilingual	Via Whisper	Multilingual
System-wide dictation	Coming*			Direct build*
Chat with your notes	Yes, local
Voice → structured task
Speaker diarization	Yes, advanced panel (Mac)		Basic	Basic
Cross-device note library
Price	iPhone free · Mac one-time	Subscription	Subscription / lifetime	One-time

* System-wide dictation lives outside the Mac App Store: coming in the direct-download VAYS build, and shipping in Whisper Notes' direct download today.

Based on publicly available information (September 2026); competitors' features and pricing change over time.

Did you know?

While building VAYS, we built something bigger.

VAYS KIT is the private-AI foundation behind the app: a reusable Swift package for Apple platforms. The project is focused on building the backbone for sovereign AI, solutions that run fully on your own hardware, with complete privacy and control on your side.

VAYS KIT

Built once. Reused forever.

Audio

AI

Sync

Privacy

Processing

Payments

Built on VAYS KIT

VAYS Live

Private voice notes, transcription, local chat and tasks across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.

VAYS MD READER New

Read and write beautiful Markdown on the Mac: callouts, Mermaid diagrams and math rendered fully offline. Now on the Mac App Store.

Mac App Store → Learn more →

VAYS MED In development

Transcribe medical visits and dictate clinical documentation, fully on-device, where patient data must never leave the room.

Learn more →

Your product

The same sovereign-AI foundation, ready for your domain: private by design, running on your own hardware.

Under the hood

Open-weight AI, packaged for Apple-native products.

VAYS KIT brings transcription, a local LLM, diarization, storage, sync and monetization into one reusable stack.

Built on models from

Parakeet · Nemotron · Sortformer

Gemma

silicon

Parakeet TDT v3

NVIDIA ASR through FluidAudio and CoreML

ASR

Gemma

Google open-weight LLM via a custom llama.xcframework

LLM

Nemotron ASR

NVIDIA multilingual model for Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Hindi

ASR

WhisperKit

Alternate on-device transcription path

ASR

Speaker diarization

On-device speaker turns and a local voice library

DIARIZE

Bonjour + HTTP

Local Mac and iPhone discovery and sync

SYNC

StoreKit 2

Reusable Pro unlock and feature access

PRO

FAQ

Questions, answered.

Does VAYS work offline and keep my data private?

Yes. Transcription, summaries, local chat and Quick Tasks run on your device by default, so your audio doesn't have to leave it. No account, no tracking, no cloud pipeline.

Does VAYS support Polish?

Polish is first-class. VAYS is built around real Polish transcription with Parakeet, not English-only assumptions. The app UI is available in English, Polish, German, French and Spanish; this site in Polish and English.

Which languages can VAYS transcribe?

Polish and English are the most polished, and the same on-device engine handles the major European languages, from Spanish and German to Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and Russian. A dedicated engine adds Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Hindi. Whatever the language, transcription runs on your device.

How much does VAYS cost?

VAYS is free on iPhone and iPad, with an optional tip jar; nothing is locked. The Mac app is a one-time purchase (79.99 PLN) with the full desktop toolkit. No subscription, nothing else you need to buy.

Can I import old recordings? Is there a per-minute fee?

Yes. Bring in voice memos, interviews or lecture recordings and VAYS transcribes them on your device. There are no per-minute fees and no upload limits, because there is no cloud to meter you; hours of audio cost nothing extra. Speed depends on your hardware.

Does VAYS work for meetings?

Yes. Record the meeting in the room or import the recording afterwards, and VAYS turns it into a transcript and summary on your device. On the Mac, speaker diarization labels who said what, which keeps long meetings readable.

Is VAYS suitable for confidential conversations under GDPR?

VAYS processes audio on your device by default, so no third party has to receive a recording just to produce the transcript. That is a strong starting point under GDPR: the data stays under your control. Whether you may record a given conversation remains your responsibility.

Does VAYS need an internet connection?

Only to download the app and its AI models the first time. After that, recording, transcription, summaries and local chat work without a connection: on a plane, in a basement, on a building site.

How is VAYS different from Otter.ai, Wispr Flow, Superwhisper or Whisper Notes?

Otter.ai and Wispr Flow process audio in the cloud; Superwhisper and Whisper Notes transcribe locally. VAYS keeps processing on your device too, and goes further: Polish-first transcription plus a full voice workspace with notes, local chat, structured tasks and cross-device sync, free to start.

What is VAYS KIT?

VAYS KIT is the private-AI foundation behind the app: a reusable Swift package for sovereign, on-device AI with full privacy and control on the user's side. It powers VAYS today and use cases like VAYS MED (medical transcription) next.

Which devices do I need?