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Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

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Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#211

Post by acjacobson »

Nice app! Feedback since you asked: The most obvious must-have feature IMO is to paste automatically. Don't require me to hit a shortcut (or at least make it configurable)

The next most critical thing I think is speed and in my tests it's just a little bit slower than other solutions. That matters a lot when it comes to these tools.

The third thing, more of a nice to have is controlling formatting. By this I mean - say a few sentences, then "new line" and the model interprets "new line" as formatting, not as literal text.

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#213

Post by vunderba »

stingraycharles wrote: post #194
karimf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the /r/macapps subreddit, they have huge influx of new apps posts, and the "whisper dictation" is one of the most saturated category. [0] >“Compare” - This is the most important part. Apps in the most saturated categories (whisper dictation, clipboard managers, wallpaper apps, etc.) must clearly explain their differentiation from existing solutions. https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1r6d06r/new_post_r...

Seems like there’s also a huge influx of these apps as they’re relatively easy to make with LLMs. That whole list of requirements there is actually a good thing that anyone who wants to make a new application should ask themselves.

This and 100% client-side PDF editors/tools. It's the new "hello world" for vibe-coding.

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#214

Post by wat10000 »

angristan wrote: post #210
stingraycharles wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get from that the voice input is sent to Apple / the cloud? As far as I understand Apple’s voice model runs locally for most languages. Siri commands can be used for training, but is also executed locally and sent to Apple separately (and this can be disabled).

I couldn't believe it either but when you enable it the settings of macOS you get this popup: > When you dictate text, information like your voice input and contact names are sent to Apple to help your Mac recognize what you’re saying.

Elsewhere it says:

"When you use Dictation, your device will indicate in Keyboard Settings if your audio and transcripts are processed on your device and not sent to Apple servers. Otherwise, the things you dictate are sent to and processed on the server, but will not be stored unless you opt in to Improve Siri and Dictation."

And:

"Dictation processes many voice inputs on your Mac. Information will be sent to Apple in some cases."

In conclusion... I think they're trying to cover all their bases, but it sounds like things are processed locally as long as the hardware can handle it.

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#216

Post by foltik »

mulquin wrote: post #159
foltik wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... a vibe slop index to keep track of all the vibe slop apps? The cherry on top: it’s completely broken! Enable the Context Awareness filter, the list shrinks. Now enable the Auto-pasting filter, the list grows back.

I wouldn't call it completely broken; Pressing buttons still does something, it looks like an OR filter instead of an AND. It should be updated to be an AND filter as that's more intuitive.

If you squint, it looks kinda maybe superficially useful? But if you actually critically look at it, it makes no sense.

The categories are clearly LLM generated from the GhostPepper codebase, with vague low level descriptions and links to code. Most categories apply to every listed project.

The UI is the same tiny bit of LLM generated information displayed five different confusing ways. Like seriously, click on a project and you first see a bunch of haphazard feature cards, then a bunch of “feature ... active” rows. Looks fancy, but actually just noise. Textbook slop.

Better would be a simple awesome-style markdown page, with a feature matrix having categories and descriptions curated by a human that actually understands and cares about the domain.

Sorry if this is harsh, but passing off LLM output as “curation” is particularly insulting to me.

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#217

Post by cootsnuck »

taffydavid wrote: post #181
cootsnuck wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. My Pixel 7 transcription is barely usable for me. Makes way too many mistakes and defeats the purpose of me not having to type, but maybe that's just my experience. The latest open source local STT models people are running on devices are significantly more robust (e.g. whisper models, parakeet models, etc.). So background noise, mumbling, and/or just not having a perfect audio environment doesn't trip u…

I've built my own tts apps testing whisper and while it's good it does hallucinate quite a bit if there's noise, or just sometimes when the audio is perfectly clear. It often gives the illusion of being very good but I could record a half hour of me speaking and discover some very random stuff in the middle that I did not say

Yup, you're absolutely right. The open source models do have their rough edges. I use NVIDIA's Parakeet v3 model a lot locally, and it will occasionally do this thing where it just repeats a word like a dozen times.

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#218

Post by znagengast »

LuxBennu wrote: post #41
goodroot wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yeah, longform is interesting. Not sure how you're running it, via whichever "app thing", but... On resource limited machines: "Continuous recording" mode outputs when silence is detected via a configurable threshold. This outputs as you speak in more reasonable chunks; in aggregate "the same output" just chunked efficiently. Maybe you can try hackin' that up?

Yeah that makes sense, chunking on silence would sidestep the latency issue pretty cleanly. I've been running it through a basic fastapi wrapper so it just takes whatever audio blob gets thrown at it, no chunking logic on the server side. Might be worth adding a vad pass before sending to whisper though, would cut down on processing dead air too.

Maintainer of WhisperKit here, confirming we do exactly that for longform. We search for the longest "low energy" silence in the second half of the audio window and set the chunking point to the middle of that silence. It uses a version of the webrtc vad algorithm, and significantly speeds up longform because we can run a large amount of concurrent inference requests through CoreML's async prediction api. Whisper is also pretty smart with silent portions since the encoder will tell it if there are any words at all in the chunk, and simply stop predicting tokens after the prefill step - although you could save the ~100ms encoder run entirely with a good vad model, which our recently opensourced pyannote CoreML pipeline can do.

Re: Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

#219

Post by goodroot »

ericd wrote: post #136
goodroot wrote: post #4

Nice one! For Linux folks, I developed https://github.com/goodroot/hyprwhspr . On Linux, there's access to the latest Cohere Transcribe model and it works very, very well. Requires a GPU though. Larger local models generally shouldn't require a subordinate model for clean up. Have you compared WhisperKit to faster-whisper or similar? You might be able to run turbov3 successfully and negate the need for cleanup. Incid…

Nice, I've been using Hyprwhspr on Omarchy daily for a while now, it's been awesome, thanks very much.

Thanks ericd! Glad to hear.
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