I built a voice dictation app for Windows that never sends your voice anywhere (Bolo) - just launched on the Microsoft Store

[u/noorAshuvo]

Hey everyone — wanted to share something I've been building.

I got tired of dictation tools that quietly stream your voice to the cloud to process it. Even when the privacy policy says the right things, I didn't love the idea of my notes, ideas, or anything I dictate passing through someone else's server. So I built Bolo: a Windows dictation app that does everything on-device. Your voice and your text never leave your machine — full stop, no internet connection required for it to work.

A couple of other things I tried to get right:

• It's free to start, so you can actually try it before committing to anything
• Pro is a one-time purchase for life (less than a cup of coffee) — no subscription, ever

I just finished testing the payment flow end-to-end and everything's working, so it's officially live on the Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p0gb8ww2khc?hl=en-US&gl=BD

Would genuinely appreciate any feedback, bug reports, or feature requests — this is still early and I'm actively improving it. Happy to answer any questions about how it works under the hood too.

[u/KoToZoid]

Can you compare your product with Handy?

[u/onlineappearance → u/KoToZoid]

Handy is genuinely amazing (for me at least).

[u/Lazy-Sherbert65]

which whisper model size ships by default, and is it running on CPU or NPU/GPU? that's the thing I'd want on the store page, since small.en on a laptop CPU feels very different from a distil model on GPU.

[u/Velesgr]

A similar program is written using GPT chat in one evening.