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Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

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Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

#51
Not a fan of high resource use or reliance on proprietary vendors/services. DeepSpeech/Vosk were pre-AI and still worked well on local devices, but they were a huge pain to set up and use. Anyone have better versions of those? Looks like one successor was Coqui STT, which then evolved into Coqui TTS which seems still maintained. Kaldi seems older but also still maintained.

edit: nvm, this overview explains the different options: https://www.gladia.io/blog/best-open-source-speech-to-text-m... and https://www.gladia.io/blog/thinking-of-using-open-source-whi...

Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

#52

All these all just Whisper wrappers? I don't get it, the underlying model still isn't as good as paid custom models from companies, is there an actual open source / weights alternative to Whisper for speech to text? I know only of Parakeet.

Voxtral mini is a bit bigger but their mixed language demos looked super impressive https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral

Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

#53
post #47

Wait, I'm confused. The text here says all data remains on device and emphasises how much you can trust that, that you're obsessed with local-first software, etc. Clicking on the demo video, step one is... configuring access tokens for external services? Are the services shown at 0:21 (Groq, OpenAI, Antrophic, Google, ElevenLabs) doing the actual transcription, listening to everything I say, and is only the resulting…

> All your data is stored locally on your device, and your audio goes directly from your machine to your chosen cloud provider (Groq, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, etc.) or local provider (Speaches, owhisper, etc.)

Their point is they aren’t a middleman with this, and you can use your preferred supplier or run something locally.

Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

#54
post #48

Now we just need text to speech so we can truly interact with our computers hands free.

$ apt install espeak-ng $ espeak-ng 'Hello, World!' It takes some adjustment and sounds a lot worse than what e.g. Google ships proprietarily on your phone, but after ~30 seconds of listening (if I haven't used it recently) I understand it just as well as I understand the TTS engine on my phone If there's a more modern package that sounds more human that's a similar no-brainer to install, I'd be interested, but just…

  $ apt install festival
  $ echo "Hello, World!" | festival --tts
Not impressively better, but I find festival slightly more intelligible.

Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

#55

Can it tell voices apart?

Speaker diarization is the term you are looking for, and this is more difficult than simple transcription. I'm rather confident that someone probably has a good solution by now (if you want to pay for an API), but I haven't seen an open-source/open-weights tool for diarization/transcription. I looked a few months ago, but things move fast...

Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

#56
post #47

Wait, I'm confused. The text here says all data remains on device and emphasises how much you can trust that, that you're obsessed with local-first software, etc. Clicking on the demo video, step one is... configuring access tokens for external services? Are the services shown at 0:21 (Groq, OpenAI, Antrophic, Google, ElevenLabs) doing the actual transcription, listening to everything I say, and is only the resulting…

The local transcription feature via whisper.cpp was just released 2 hours ago: https://github.com/epicenter-so/epicenter/releases/tag/v7.3....

Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

#57

Can it tell voices apart?

Speaker diarization is the term you are looking for, and this is more difficult than simple transcription. I'm rather confident that someone probably has a good solution by now (if you want to pay for an API), but I haven't seen an open-source/open-weights tool for diarization/transcription. I looked a few months ago, but things move fast...

Thanks, that, yeah. I've looked occasionally but it's been a bit. Necessary feature in a house with a 9yo. I've been thinking about taking a swing at solving my problem without solving the general problem.

Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

#58
Thanks for sharing! Transcription suddenly became useful to me when LLMs started being able to generate somewhat useful code from natural language. (I don't think anybody wants to dictate code.) Now my workflow is similar to yours.

I have mixed feelings about OS-integration. I'm currently working on a project to use a foot-pedal for push-to-transcribe - it speaks USB-HID so it works anywhere without software, and it doesn't clobber my clipboard. That said, an app like yours really opens up some cool possibilities! For example, in a keyboard-emulation strategy like mine, I can't easily adjust the text prompt/hint for the transcription model.

With an application running on the host though, you can inject relevant context/prompts/hints (either for transcription, or during your post-transformations). These might be provided intentionally by the user, or, if they really trust your app, this context could even be scraped from what's currently on-screen (or which files are currently being worked on).

Another thing I've thought about doing is using a separate keybind (or button/pedal) that appends the transcription directly to a running notes file. I often want to make a note to reference later, but which I don't need immediately. It's a little extra friction to have to actually have my notes file open in a window somewhere.

Will keep an eye on epicenter, appreciate the ethos.

Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

#59
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ apt install espeak-ng $ espeak-ng 'Hello, World!' It takes some adjustment and sounds a lot worse than what e.g. Google ships proprietarily on your phone, but after ~30 seconds of listening (if I haven't used it recently) I understand it just as well as I understand the TTS engine on my phone If there's a more modern package that sounds more human that's a similar no-brainer to install, I'd be interested, but just…

$ apt install festival $ echo "Hello, World!" | festival --tts Not impressively better, but I find festival slightly more intelligible.

Will give it a spin, thanks!
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