WhatsApp Transcriber

Voice notes are great for the sender. They’re not great for me. I read quickly and struggle to concentrate on recorded voices. I can’t listen to most podcasts. But I understand why people send them, so I built something to transcribe them automatically.

It uses Deepgram to transcribe incoming voice notes and sends the text back to me in WhatsApp. I had the idea, and 45 minutes later the app was live in a Docker container on my home server. Fifteen minutes after that, a friend pointed out WhatsApp already had the feature. I archived the repo.

From idea to release to retirement in an hour. Only possible when an LLM writes most of the code.

I’ve since brought it back. WhatsApp’s transcription is decent but requires manual activation on each message and isn’t available on web or desktop. The transcriber runs automatically so I don’t have to think about it.