Four questions decide it: what machine you have, what must not leave it, which subscriptions you already pay for, and which language you speak. Answer them and the rest follows.
Three choices, not one
People say "which model" as if there were one. Dimmy actually asks you three separate questions, and you can answer them differently.
Stage
What it does
Can be
Speech to text
Turns your voice into words.
Local engine, or a cloud provider.
Rewrite
Applies a style or tone to those words. Optional.
Off, local LLM, cloud LLM, or your own Claude / ChatGPT / Gemini plan.
Recap
Summarises a whole meeting. Optional.
Same options as rewrite, picked independently.
Nothing forces them to match. Local speech to text with a cloud recap is a perfectly normal setup, and it is the one most privacy-minded users land on.
Question 1: what machine do you have
Dimmy reads your hardware at first run and preselects for you. It never hides a model and never blocks one. The worst it does is preselect the cloud card, show you an amber or red dot next to a model that will not fit, and free up memory before loading something large.
Your machine
Dimmy's verdict
What it means
Apple Silicon Mac
Good
Always. Unified memory plus the Neural Engine, which nothing else is fighting you for.
Dedicated GPU, 4 GB or more
Good
Any local model on the list is realistic.
Dedicated GPU, 2 to 4 GB
Tight
Smaller models only. Large ones will load, then crawl or fail.
Integrated graphics
Poor
Cloud is a better start, no matter how much system RAM you have.
GPU could not be read
Unknown
Treated as fine, not as weak. Dimmy will not push you to the cloud on a guess.
Question 2: what must not leave your computer
This is the question worth answering honestly, because it is the one that is hard to undo. Here is exactly what goes out in each setup.
Setup
Audio leaves?
Text leaves?
Who receives it
Local speech to text, no rewrite
No
No
Nobody.
Local speech to text, local LLM
No
No
Nobody.
Local speech to text, cloud rewrite
No
Yes, the transcription
Only the vendor whose model you picked.
Cloud speech to text, cloud rewrite
Yes, the recording is uploaded
Yes
The speech vendor gets your audio, the rewrite vendor gets your text. They can be two different companies.
A CLI bridge (Claude, Codex, Gemini)
No
Yes, the text
Your own plan, through the vendor's own official command. Dimmy never reads your credentials.
For a recap, the entire meeting transcript goes to whichever provider you picked for it. A local recap keeps all of it on the machine. Either way the audio, the transcript and the recap stay saved in your recordings folder.
Question 3: which subscriptions do you already pay for
This is the part people miss, and it is the one that saves the most money. If you already pay for Claude, ChatGPT or a Gemini Code Assist work seat, Dimmy can run the rewrite and the recap through that plan instead of an API key. It drives the vendor's own command line tool, so the work is billed against the plan you already have and costs no extra credit.
Work accounts only. Google ended Gemini CLI access for personal accounts, including AI Pro and Ultra, so you have to confirm yours is a company seat before the option appears.