This was 2 years ago, so maybe it's simple now, but I didn't find it "amazingly easy" back then.
I do have a number of projects where I could definitely use a local speech recognition library. I have used [Python SpeechRecognition](https://github.com/Uberi/speech_recognition/blob/master/exam...) to essentially record and transcribe from a scanner. I wanted to take it further, but google at the time limited the number of requests per day. Today's announcement seems to indicate they will be expanding their free usage, but a local setup would be much better. I'd like to deploy this in a place that might not have reliable Internet.