Whisper Field Report – a field reporting tool in the work of the international detective agency PalmGroup
After a day in the field, a private investigator does not dream of another two hours at the keyboard. Voice memos from the dictaphone, hundreds of surveillance photos, handwritten notes from the block – all of it has to be turned into a coherent, professional report for the client. What used to eat a full evening of typing is now ten minutes of review, thanks to Whisper Field Report.
At the international detective agency PalmGroup, Whisper Field Report has become a daily tool for turning field material into finished reports. In this article we explain how it works, why we chose a fully offline solution, and where the software can be purchased.
Why field work needs an offline tool
The data collected during a surveillance run – voice recordings, photos of people and vehicles, captured license plates – is among the most sensitive information a private investigator ever handles. Every upload to a cloud service means:
• a potential breach of professional confidentiality
• client data stored on somebody else's servers
• a leak risk if the provider is compromised
• no control over who keeps the material and for how long
👉 That is why at PalmGroup we strongly prefer tools that run entirely on our own hardware. No recording and no surveillance photo should ever leave the detective's laptop – and Whisper Field Report is built exactly around that principle.
From voice memo to finished report – three steps
1. Drop in the audio
Plug in your dictaphone or memory card and upload MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG or WebM files. Multiple files from a single surveillance shift land in the same report. A local voice-to-text AI starts immediately and transcribes every word in 27+ languages – no upload queue, no cloud.
2. Add the evidence
In a single batch you upload photos (JPG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF) and video clips. The optional AI vision describes scenes, detects objects, people and vehicles, and reads license plates via OCR – everything automatically matched to the timestamps in your voice narration. Need a still frame from a clip? One click is enough.
3. Review and export
Review once, then export: PDF for print and handover to the client, ODT for polishing in LibreOffice or Microsoft Word, or JSON if you are piping results into a case management system. Photos, timestamps and AI analysis are baked in.
Local voice transcription in 27 languages
At the heart of Whisper Field Report is a voice-to-text transcription built on the whisper.cpp library, running the AI model directly on your laptop's CPU. That means:
• full privacy – the recording never reaches an external service
• support for 27+ languages, including English, German and Polish
• no hour caps and no per-minute charges
• works in a car, in a hotel and anywhere without a stable internet connection
👉 For detective work, which constantly moves between countries across Europe, that is an enormous operational advantage.
Photo analysis and license plate OCR
Whisper Field Report combines voice transcription with image analysis powered by local AI models:
• scene description – the moondream2 model writes a concise description of what is visible in each photo
• object and vehicle detection – the YOLOv11 model identifies people, cars and objects relevant to the case
• license plate OCR – an OCR pipeline built on ONNX Runtime reads plate numbers directly from the photo
• frame grab from video – a single click pulls any frame out of a clip
All of these features run locally, on the same laptop the detective carries back from the field.
Cases, hours and kilometers in one place
Whisper Field Report is not just transcription. It is also a lightweight management layer for cases, reports, work hours and kilometers driven:
• hour summaries generated automatically from the work time logged in your reports
• kilometers from every field run captured next to the hours – no more reconstructing drives at the end of the month
• reports from several detectives on a single case – an auto-generated rundown of every hour worked and every kilometer driven by the team
• local SQLite database – everything stored on the detective's computer, no accounts, no tracking
👉 For a private investigator that translates into several hours of desk work saved every week – and a single source of truth for invoicing.
Why PalmGroup uses Whisper Field Report
In our work we handle material every day that absolutely must not end up in any cloud. Clients trust us with sensitive information: suspected infidelity, employee fraud, corporate intelligence, blackmail and extortion cases. Every one of those recordings needs to be protected exactly the way a classic paper case file would be – in a place that we control, not an external provider.
Whisper Field Report meets those requirements without compromise: a single executable file, no installation, no Docker dependencies, no account required. Download, run, and start reporting – on Linux or Windows.
Where to get Whisper Field Report
The tool is available on the official site whisper.mapaho.com. There you will find:
• a free demo version to try on your own recordings
• downloads for Linux and Windows – a single binary, no installer
• subscription plans that unlock all features: unlimited transcription, full AI vision and clean PDF and ODT exports
• documentation and technical information
Whisper Field Report is one of the tools available from the mapaho.com shop, designed specifically for professional detective work.
👉 For PalmGroup clients, we also offer consulting on how to integrate the tool into day-to-day operations and on how to organise the report workflow.
Summary
A private investigator spends many hours in the field – but the real value for the client only exists in the finished, professional report. Thanks to Whisper Field Report, the time required to produce one drops from several hours to about ten minutes, and full control over the data stays in the detective's hands. No cloud, no account, no external APIs. The software can be purchased directly at whisper.mapaho.com.
Discretion • Effectiveness • International experience
If you are considering Whisper Field Report for your own detective work, or you want to learn more about the offline tools we use at PalmGroup – contact us. We will help you pick the right tool for your workflow.
