Adding Gemma 4 speech recognition to a .NET desktop app: the llama-server sidecar that survived

In April 2026 Google shipped Gemma 4, a multimodal model with a native audio path. I wanted to add it to Parlotype, my .NET 10 dictation app, as a second speech engine alongside Whisper. Four runtime paths got cut before I landed on llama.cpp's llama-server as a child process. This post walks through the cuts, the architecture that survived, the variant catalog, and the benchmarks. Parlotype is a voice-to-text desktop app for Windows with on-device speech recognition as the default. You hold a...