Gazette — any payment notification becomes a ledger, entirely on your phone

You're standing in a shop and someone says they've sent you Rs 2,000. You
check your phone. The notification is gone — or it's there, wedged between a
pizza promo and an OTP, and you can't tell if that Rs figure is the money
arriving or your balance after it left.

Every wallet and bank in Pakistan writes these notifications differently.
Existing ledger apps solve this with hundreds of hardcoded format rules —
one per bank, per app, per phrasing — and they break the day a bank rewords
a push notification.

Gazette takes a different bet: a small language model, running entirely on
your phone, reads the notification the way you do. No format tables. No
cloud. No INTERNET permission — the app is physically incapable of sending
your notifications anywhere.

What it is

One screen. A statement.

Money received and money sent at the top under an accounting double rule.
Below, every detected payment, newest first: amount right-aligned in a
column, and the original notification text underneath, verbatim — it's
evidence, not paraphrase. Received amounts are set in a deep pine green;
sent amounts stay ink. Nothing else. No cards, no icons, no merchant
database to maintain.

Payments arrive as notifications from any app. Gazette listens, reads,
and files them.

The stack, bottom up

Gemma 3 1B (int4) runs on-device through LiteRT-LM. Around it, five layers:

1. A structural gate. If the text doesn't contain an Rs/PKR amount pattern, it never reaches the model. Most notification traffic — promos, OTPs, service messages — dies here in zero milliseconds.
2. A classifier vote. The model answers one word: is this a payment? Three samples, majority decides. Not sure means no — the fail-safe direction is always "don't record".
3. An extraction vote. Survivors get read for amount and direction, again as three samples.
4. Vote parsing with exact, tested semantics.
5. Reconciliation — rules, no model. A verb lexicon (paid, sent, debited, received, credited…), a balance-state veto, an event-verb rescue, and an OTP veto that discards any OTP-shaped text even if it carries an amount. Your one-time codes are never shown, never stored.

The part I'm proud of: small model, honest numbers

I calibrated on a corpus I collected myself — 28 real payment notifications
across NayaPay-style QR, RAAST, and IBFT transfers (sanitized: pseudonyms,
masked accounts), 18 junk negatives, 2 synthetic sent-side pushes. Every
number below is from archived runs, replayable from the repo.

The 4B needed zero help: the rules overrode nothing. The 1B reached the same
accuracy with the reconciliation layer overriding exactly 7 decisions — two
rescues, one veto, four direction fixes. That's the thesis of Gazette: the
engineering compensates for the model size, deterministically, and every
override is a written rule you can audit — not a bigger model you have to
trust.

On desktop CPU the 1B pipeline averaged 8.6s per notification across all 30
corpus entries (the 4B: 18.2s). On the Android emulator — an x86_64 box with
no phone-class acceleration — the identical on-device pipeline took ~2.3
minutes per notification, end to end from notification posted to ledger row
(two measured runs: 137s, 146s). A physical-phone timing will land in this
post as soon as a device run is logged — no estimate, no vaporware numbers.

Honest caveat: that corpus is one phone's notifications, tuned in-sample.
It proves the pipeline works end-to-end and that nothing about it is
bank-specific; it does not prove universal coverage. Fresh captures keep
getting added.

Why open innovation matters here

Gazette is only possible — and only sellable — because the model is
open-weight and runs on the phone:

• Zero marginal cost is what makes a small app viable. Someone who moves money across five wallets and banks would pay a few dollars for a ledger that just works. If every notification cost an API call, the same app would need a subscription to survive — and a subscription for a notification ledger is a hard sell. Running Gemma locally costs nothing per read.
• Privacy is a feature, not a policy page. Because the weights are open, the whole pipeline can live on the device. The missing INTERNET permission isn't a workaround; it's the selling point.
• No lock-in. The pipeline is model-agnostic over LiteRT-LM. When a better small model ships, Gazette gets it with a file swap — no renegotiated pricing, no deprecations, nobody else deciding tomorrow what my app costs to run.

Privacy, structurally

• No INTERNET permission. Not "we promise not to call home" — the OS forbids it.
• The model file is brought in by you: GET THE FILE opens Google's Gemma release page in your browser, you download the file there, and hand it to the app through the system file picker. The app never downloads anything — it can't.
• OTPs are vetoed by rule, not by model judgment.
• The notification text is stored as received — on your device, in a local Room database, and nowhere else.

The design

The screen is typeset like a statement because that's what it is. One type
family (Schibsted Grotesk), tabular figures so the amount column aligns like
a printed ledger, hairline rules instead of cards, one accent color reserved
for money received. Zero border radius anywhere — a statement isn't a chat
bubble. While the model reads a fresh notification, a single READING row
pulses at the top and then either files itself or disappears.

Try it

Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, LiteRT-LM. Android 9+, arm64.

Grab the signed APK straight from the repo
(apk/Gazette-v0.1.0-arm64.apk),
or build from source with ./gradlew :app:installDebug.

1. Open Gazette, tap ENABLE ACCESS, allow it in the system list.
2. Tap GET THE FILE — it opens the Gemma release page; accept the license and download gemma3-1b-it-int4.litertlm (~557 MB).
3. Back in Gazette, tap I HAVE THE FILE and pick the download. It is copied into the app's private storage.

The first read after import warms the model up (on the emulator, ~2.5
minutes end to end). After that, every payment notification becomes a row as
it arrives. Full instructions in the repo README.

What's next

• Fresh-capture accuracy runs on phones I don't own
• A sent-side capture corpus (my received-side corpus is real; sent-side is currently 2 synthetic pushes)
• Dark theme — v1 is deliberately daylight-only, because the moment this screen gets used is standing in a bazaar at noon

Repo: github.com/Burry071/gazette

Built for the DEV × Hacktoberfest Week 2 "Side Hustle" challenge (#hf26challenge).