Cloud providers compared

Dimmy ships a catalogue of 8 cloud providers, plus a Custom endpoint for any OpenAI-compatible API. You bring the key, Dimmy talks to the API directly. We never proxy your traffic.

Not every provider does everything

• Six of the eight do speech to text. Anthropic and OpenRouter are rewrite-only, they have no transcription endpoint.
• Deepgram is the mirror image: speech to text only, no rewrite and no recap.
• OpenRouter's two models are not offered for meeting recaps. Everything else in the catalogue is.
• Models are kept in one catalogue compiled into the app, so Windows and macOS read the same list and cannot drift apart. Retired model ids are removed rather than left to fail at call time.

Streaming dictation

Two cloud backends can transcribe while you are still talking: OpenAI Realtime, which Dimmy prefers, and Deepgram nova-3. Nobody else in the list streams. With neither key present, streaming falls back to the local chunked transcriber. Which one is used follows the speech provider you already configured, there is no second setting to keep in sync.

File size limits

Long recordings are split before upload when the provider will not take them whole. The ceilings differ a lot, and Gemini's is the one you will notice.

Adding a provider

Open Settings → Providers & keys and find the provider card. Add your API key in the key field. The key is stored encrypted on your device. See Add your API key. The On-device card on the same page lists your local models with a green check next to the ones already downloaded, see Choose a Whisper model.

Mixing local and cloud

You can run speech to text locally and the rewrite in the cloud, or the reverse, and the meeting recap is a third independent choice with its own provider and its own key. A common setup is local Whisper for transcription, which never leaves the machine, and a cloud flagship for the recap. See the on-device LLM and Meeting recaps.