Read the low star reviews of the hosted transcription apps: accuracy is 12 complaints out of 75

Pulled the App Store review feed for the hosted meeting notes and voice to text apps, expecting the complaint pile to be about word error rate. It is not. Of 75 low star reviews in that category: price 37, privacy 16, cancellation 13, accuracy 12, crashes 9, sync 6.

The transcription is mostly fine. What people are furious about is everything wrapped around it.

The ladder. "Free, then fifty a year, then a hundred, now more than a hundred." "You call it Pro and then cap me at ninety minutes a meeting." And the one that names the experience exactly: "it cut out at minute eighty nine and I watched the last nineteen minutes of my own conversation from behind a paywall."

The loss. "Recorded a forty minute meeting and deleted it while processing." "New phone, changed the email, ended up with three accounts, all my recordings gone." That is the worst thing a product like this can do, because the artefact is not reproducible. The meeting happened once.

And where accuracy does come up, it is almost never words. It is who said them. "Two people talking and it decided there were four." "Constantly mixes up the speakers." Overlap, accents, fast speech. Plus a separate small pile about mixed language audio failing entirely.

Which is the case for running it locally, made by the paying customers of the hosted ones rather than by anybody in this room. Not cheaper. Not more accurate. Just yours, uncapped, and impossible to delete from a server you do not control.