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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

#31

Post by daemonologist »

parhamn wrote: post #19

I see a lot of whisper stuff out there. Are these the same old OpenAI whispers or have they been updated heavily? I've been using parakeet v3 which is fantastic (and tiny). Confused why we're still seeing whisper out there, there's been a lot of development.

Whisper is still old reliable - I find that it's less prone to hallucinations than newer models, easier to run (on AMD GPU, via whisper.cpp), and only ~2x slower than parakeet. I even bothered to "port" Parakeet to Nemo-less pytorch to run it on my GPU, and still went back to Whisper after a couple of days.

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

#32

Post by MattHart88 »

ericmcer wrote: post #29

I see quite a few of these, the killer feature to me will be one that fine tunes the model based on your own voice. E.G. if your name is `Donold` (pronounced like Donald) there is not a transcription model in existence that will transcribe your name correctly. That means forget inputting your name or email ever, it will never output it correctly. Combine that with any subtleties of speech you have, or industry jargon…

I've found the "corrections" feature works well for most of the jargon and misspelling use cases. Can you give it a try and let me know edge cases?

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

#33

Post by sorenjan »

ericmcer wrote: post #29

I see quite a few of these, the killer feature to me will be one that fine tunes the model based on your own voice. E.G. if your name is `Donold` (pronounced like Donald) there is not a transcription model in existence that will transcribe your name correctly. That means forget inputting your name or email ever, it will never output it correctly. Combine that with any subtleties of speech you have, or industry jargon…

Whisper supports a prompt, you can put your "Donold" there.

https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/examples/whisper_prom...

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

#35

Post by __mharrison__ »

Cool, I've been doing a lot of "coding" (and other typing tasks) recently by tapping a button on my Stream Deck. It starts recording me until I tap it again. At which point, it transcribes the recording and plops it into the paste buffer.

The button next to it pastes when I press it. If I press it again, it hits the enter command.

You can get a lot done with two buttons.

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

#36

Post by purplehat_ »

Hi Matt, there's lots of speech-to-text programs out there with varying levels of quality. 100% local is admirable but it's always a tradeoff and users have to decide for themselves what's worth it.

Would you consider making available a video showing someone using the app?

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

#37

Post by realityfactchex »

gegtik wrote: post #26

how does this compare to macos built in siri TTS, in quality and in privacy?

Exactly my question. I double-tap the control button and macOS does native, local TTS dictation pretty well. (Similar to Keyboard > Enable Dictation setting on iOS.)

The macOS built-in TTS (dictation) seems better than all the 3rd party, local apps I tried in the past that people raved about. I have tried several.

Is this better somehow?

If the 3rd party apps did streaming with typing in place and corrections within a reasonable window when they understand things better given more context, that would be cool. Theoretically, a custom model or UX could be "better" than what comes free built into macOS (more accurate or customizable).

But when I contacted the developer of my favorite one they said that would be pretty hard to implement due to having to go back and make corrections in the active field, etc.

I assume streaming STT in these utilities for Mac will get better at some point, but I haven't seen it yet (been waiting). It seems these tools generally are not streaming, e.g. they want you to finish speaking first before showing you anything. Which doesn't work for me when I'm dictating. I want to see what I've been saying lately, to jog my memory about what I've just said and help guide the next thing I'm about to say. I certainly don't want to split my attention by manually toggling the control (whether PTT or not) periodically to indicate "ok, you can render what I just said now".

I guess "hold-to-talk" tools are for delivering discrete, fully formed messages, not for longer, running dictation.

AFAICT, TFA is focused on hold-to-talk as the differentiator, over double-tap to begin speaking and double-tap to end speaking?

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

#38

Post by realityfactchex »

Supercompressor wrote: post #27

I've been looking for the opposite - wanting to dump text and it be read to me, coherently. Anyone have good recommendations?

Sure, Chatterbox TTS Server is rather high quality: https://github.com/devnen/Chatterbox-TTS-Server

You could hook it up to some workflow over the local API depending on how you want to dump the text, but the web UI is good too.

The Show HN by the author was at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44145564

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

#39

Post by goodroot »

parhamn wrote: post #19

I see a lot of whisper stuff out there. Are these the same old OpenAI whispers or have they been updated heavily? I've been using parakeet v3 which is fantastic (and tiny). Confused why we're still seeing whisper out there, there's been a lot of development.

Whisper is very good in many languages.

It's also in many flavours, from tiny to turbo, and so can fit many system profiles.

That's what makes it unique and hard to replace.

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

#40

Post by chrisweekly »

hephaes7us wrote: post #8
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…

Thanks for sharing! I was literally getting ready to build, essentially, this. Now it looks like I don't have to! Have you ever considered using a foot-pedal for PTT? Apple incidentally already has native STT, but for some reason they just don't use a decent model yet.

sorry, PTT?
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