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...
Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
51–60 of 159 posts
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#52All 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.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#53Wait, 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…
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
#54Now 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
#55Can it tell voices apart?
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#56Wait, 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…
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#57Can 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
#58I 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
#59Earlier 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.