About ScribAI

The Problem We Solved

Typing is slow. Whether you're composing emails, writing documentation, or chatting with your team, your fingers are always the bottleneck. Built-in Windows voice typing is limited — it only works in certain apps, requires you to toggle a microphone on and off, and often gets words wrong.

ScribAI was built to fix that. It uses a simple push-to-talk hotkey that works in every application on Windows. Hold the key, speak naturally, release — and your words appear at your cursor. No setup, no dictation window, no switching apps. Just your voice, typed out instantly.

How ScribAI Works

Under the hood, ScribAI uses OpenAI’s Whisper speech recognition models. In Local mode, the Whisper model runs entirely on your machine — no internet connection is needed and no audio data leaves your PC. In Cloud mode, audio is sent to the OpenAI API for faster and more accurate transcription.

The AI Compose feature goes a step further: describe what you want written (e.g., “a polite reply to Sarah about the Q2 report”) and ScribAI drafts the full message for you using GPT.

ScribAI runs quietly in your system tray, uses minimal resources, and requires no admin rights to install. It's designed to be invisible until you need it.

Built by Shareef Studios

ScribAI is developed by Abdullah Shareef under the Shareef Studios label. Shareef Studios is an independent software studio focused on building practical, AI-powered tools that solve real productivity problems — tools we build because we need them, then share because others do too.

About the Developer

Abdullah Shareef has been building software since 2019, starting with mobile apps and expanding into desktop software and web tools. His technical background spans full-stack web development (React, Node.js, Vite), desktop application development with Electron.js, and AI integration — combining front-end product design with backend API engineering and machine learning model deployment.

Over five years, he has shipped a range of products across different platforms: productivity tools, educational apps, Islamic utilities, and voice-based software. The common thread is AI integration — finding practical ways to put machine learning models in the hands of everyday users without requiring technical expertise.

The idea for ScribAI came directly from a frustration he experienced every day: writing technical documentation, replying to emails, and drafting messages was taking up a disproportionate amount of time compared to the actual thinking required. He had experimented with Windows Voice Typing and Dragon NaturallySpeaking but found both lacking — Windows Voice Typing was inaccurate and didn’t work in every app, while Dragon was expensive, heavyweight, and hadn’t kept pace with modern AI.

After discovering OpenAI’s Whisper model in 2022 and testing its accuracy extensively across different hardware configurations, accents, and noise environments, he built the first version of ScribAI for his own use in early 2023. After sharing it with a small group of early users and seeing strong adoption, he refined it into a proper product and released it publicly in mid-2025.

Today, ScribAI is used by writers, developers, lawyers, sales reps, healthcare professionals, accessibility users, and anyone who types a lot on Windows and wants a faster, more natural workflow. Every feature in the product has been directly requested by real users or tested extensively in Abdullah’s own daily workflow. You can reach him at hello@scribai.app.

Why We’re Qualified to Build This

Building a speech recognition tool that works well requires understanding the full stack: audio capture and processing, AI model selection and inference optimisation, Windows system integration, hotkey management, clipboard operations, and UX design for a system-tray tool that needs to be invisible until needed.

ScribAI’s implementation uses faster-whisper (a CTranslate2-based reimplementation of OpenAI Whisper that’s 2–4× faster than the reference implementation), a custom audio pipeline for clean push-to-talk recording, and a Windows global hotkey system that works across all applications and privilege levels. The result is a tool that is meaningfully faster and more reliable than naive implementations of the same concept.

We also eat our own cooking. The entire ScribAI website, most of its documentation, and most of its blog content has been written using ScribAI itself. This keeps us honest about its performance, forces us to encounter the same issues users do, and drives continuous improvement from direct personal experience.

Our Philosophy

Shareef Studios builds tools that follow three principles:

• Privacy first. In Local mode, ScribAI processes everything on your machine. No audio is uploaded, no transcripts are stored, and no user data is sold. This isn’t just a legal checkbox — it’s a core design constraint.
• Lightweight by default. ScribAI is a 99 MB installer that runs in the system tray and uses minimal CPU and RAM while idle. Software that earns a permanent place on your taskbar has to deserve it — that means not slowing your machine down.
• Genuinely useful, not feature-bloated. We don’t add features because they’re technically interesting. Every feature in ScribAI solves a specific problem that real users have reported. The result is a tool that does a small number of things very well, rather than a large number of things poorly.

Why Whisper AI?

When OpenAI released Whisper as an open-source model in 2022, it was a significant leap over the accuracy of previous local speech recognition options. Whisper had been trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual audio — far more than any previous open-source model — and the results showed. Its accuracy in English rivals commercial cloud services, and its multilingual performance is exceptional.

Building on Whisper means ScribAI benefits from all future improvements to the model. It also means the core transcription engine is auditable and open — users aren’t dependent on a proprietary black box for something as sensitive as voice recording.

The tradeoff with local Whisper models is speed: smaller models (Tiny, Base) are fast but less accurate, while larger models (Small, Medium) are more accurate but take 3–8 seconds on a typical PC. ScribAI supports all commonly used Whisper model sizes and lets users choose the right balance for their hardware and use case. For users who want cloud-level accuracy with local-level latency, ScribAI also supports OpenAI’s Cloud Whisper API (Pro tier).

Roadmap & Future Plans

ScribAI is under active development. Features planned for upcoming releases include:

• Custom vocabulary support — train Whisper to recognise domain-specific terms (medical terminology, legal phrases, product names) more reliably
• Transcription history — an optional local log of your recent dictations for easy reference and recovery
• Expanded AI Compose modes — more prompt templates for common writing tasks (emails, stand-ups, meeting summaries, code comments)
• Faster local models — as distilled and quantised Whisper variants improve, we’ll integrate them for better speed-accuracy tradeoffs

Feature requests and bug reports are always welcome at hello@scribai.app or via GitHub Issues. The roadmap is shaped by what users actually need.

Other Products by Shareef Studios

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Contact

Have a question, feature request, or partnership inquiry? Reach out anytime:

• Email: hello@scribai.app
• GitHub: github.com/AbdullahShareef79/ScribAI