Speech, video and financial documents are the three things people most reliably hand to a cloud service, usually without thinking about it. These four Show HN launches each take one of them back. None of them are research projects; all four run today, on hardware you already own, and each makes a different trade to get there.
Dictation that never leaves the machine
VoxScribe is free, open-source voice typing for Windows and Android. Hold a hotkey — F9 by default, changeable from the tray — talk, release, and the words are typed straight into whatever app you are using. On Android a small floating button appears above your keyboard in any app, and it works in airplane mode. Transcription runs locally with faster-whisper on your CPU, so your audio never leaves the machine, and there is no account or subscription.
The implementation details show someone who shipped to real hardware. It types directly into the focused window rather than pasting from the clipboard, so it never overwrites what you copied. Rule-based cleanup strips filler words without calling a paid API. Spoken commands handle punctuation and corrections — "period", "new line", "scratch that", "delete last word", "capitalize that". You can drop in a folder of episodes and get an .srt beside each file, with skipped and failed files reported rather than silently dropped, plus a vocabulary list for names and jargon and replacements for words the model mishears the same way every time. MIT licensed, and the constraint is honest: CPU-only transcription means speed depends on your machine.
A voice assistant that drives your phone
Jarvis is an experimental Android voice assistant whose premise is that talking to an assistant is only useful if it can act. It opens Spotify, searches and plays the song, sets reminders, reads the weather and news, finds places, and — through the Android accessibility service — drives other apps on the phone by itself. It can also remote-control a Windows PC, having started life as the desktop assistant's Android port.
The brain runs inside the app in TypeScript rather than on a server, so the phone needs no Python and no backend. Providers are Vertex AI with a service account key, Google Gemini or Groq, plus optional free OpenRouter, NVIDIA and Mistral keys; auto mode ranks every model your keys reach by benchmark score and sends each request to the weakest one that can handle it, walking the route ladder when a free tier runs out instead of giving up. It is MIT licensed and under active development, but the README is unusually direct about the risks: it is experimental, tested on one Samsung phone running Android 16, and you should read the security documentation before giving it control of yours.
A media cloud on hardware you own
Shotstash is a self-hosted media cloud for creators and small teams — video-first storage and sharing on the PC, NAS or spare drive you already own. Storage can be a local disk, a NAS mount, or any S3-compatible bucket including AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, MinIO, RustFS and SeaweedFS. The README positions it deliberately between personal photo libraries such as Immich and PhotoPrism, which are built for a phone's camera roll, and enterprise DAMs such as ResourceSpace and Pimcore, which are built for procurement.
The parts that matter for actual work are the unglamorous ones. Uploads run as parallel parts with retries, resume after a reload or a dropped connection, and are checksum-verified with duplicate detection per project. The viewer respects the file's real aspect ratio, which for portrait video is the difference between usable and not. Share links work per file, section or project, public or private. It is MIT licensed with no paid tier and no locked features, it has run a real media library with thousands of files since 2026, and there is a read-only live demo. There is no mobile app in v1, and the quick start is Linux x64 with Docker.
A ledger that computes in the browser
Return Ledger is a portfolio tracker that logs contributions, withdrawals and valuation checkpoints, then computes an approximated time-weighted and money-weighted return entirely in the page. Everything is client-side: ledgers live in this browser's local storage, and there is no account. CSV import and export move data in and out.
The AI part is narrower than the marketing around such features usually is, and that is the point. You upload a buy or sell confirmation, a coupon or dividend notice, or a position statement from your bank or broker, and a model reads it and proposes one row for the ledger. Nothing is added until you confirm, and the page states the limits plainly: the reader is alpha, tested mainly on Italian broker documents and a few synthetic English ones, so other formats may be misread or flagged for review, and every figure should be checked against the original. The PDF contains personal data and is sent to the site's server and to Anthropic to be read, not stored or logged — which is the trade you are making, stated rather than buried.
The through line
Four different boundaries, four different costs. VoxScribe keeps the audio local and pays in transcription speed. Jarvis keeps the brain on the phone and pays in experimental rough edges. Shotstash keeps the footage on your hardware and pays in setup. Return Ledger keeps the ledger in the browser and pays in format coverage. None of them are free in the abstract — but in each case the thing you were worried about sending somewhere either stays put or goes exactly one place, for one stated reason.