Tried it with AppImage on Linux, attempted to download a model and "Failed to download model. An error occurred." but nothing that helps me track down the error :(
Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
61–70 of 159 posts
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#62Tried it with AppImage on Linux, attempted to download a model and "Failed to download model. An error occurred." but nothing that helps me track down the error :(
Same with the deb. :(
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#63Does this support using the Parakeet model locally? I'm a MacWhisper user and I find that Parakeet is way better and faster than Whisper for on-device transcription. I've been using push-to-transcribe with MacWhisper through Parakeet for a while now and it's quite magical.
Parakeet is amazing - 3000x real-time on an A100 and 5x real-time even on a laptop CPU , while being more accurate than whisper-large-v3 ( https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard ). NeMo is a little awkward though; I'm amazed it runs locally on Mac (for MacWhisper).
Yeah, Parakeet runs great locally on my M1 laptop (through MacWhisper). Transcription speed of recordings feel at least 10x faster than Whisper, and the accuracy is better as well. Push to talk for dictation is pretty seamless since the model is so fast. I've observed no downside to Parakeet if you're speaking English.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#64I've been interested in dictation for a while, but I don't want to be sending any audio to a remote API, it all has to be local. Having tried just a couple of models (namely the one used by the FUTO Keyboard), I'm kinda feeling like we're not quite there yet.
My biggest gripe perhaps is not being able to get decent content out of a thought stream; the models can't properly filter out the pauses, "uuuuhmms", and much less so handle on the fly corrections to what I've been saying, like going back and repeating something with a slight variation and whatnot.
This is a challenging problem I'd love to see being tackled well by open models I can run on my computer or phone. Are there new models more capable of this? Is it not just a model thing, and I missing a good app too?
In the meanwhile, I'll keep typing, even though it can be quite a bit less convenient to do; especially true for note taking on the go.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#65Wait, 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…
Great catch Aachen, I should have clarified this better. The app supports both external APIs (Groq, OpenAI, etc.), and more recently local transcription (via whisper.cpp, OWhisper, Speaches, etc.), which never leaves your device.
Like Leftium said, the local-first Whisper C++ implementation just posted a few hours ago.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#66Does this support using the Parakeet model locally? I'm a MacWhisper user and I find that Parakeet is way better and faster than Whisper for on-device transcription. I've been using push-to-transcribe with MacWhisper through Parakeet for a while now and it's quite magical.
Not yet, but I want it too! Parakeet looks incredible (saw that leaderboard result). My current roadmap is: finish stabilizing whisper.cpp integration, then add Parakeet support. If anyone has bandwidth to PR the connector, I’d be thrilled to merge it.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#67Wait, 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.
The issue is
> All your data is stored locally on your device,
is fundamentally incapable with half of the following sentence.
I'd write it as
> All your data is stored locally on your device, unless you explicitly decide to use a cloud provider for dictation.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#68This is wonderful, thank you for sharing! Do you have any sense of whether this type of model would work with children's speech? There are plenty of educational applications that would value a privacy-first locally deployed model. But, my understanding is that Whisper performs pretty poorly with younger speakers.
Thank you! And you’re right, I think Whisper struggles with younger voices. Haven’t tested Parakeet or other models for this yet, but that’s a great use case (especially since privacy matters in education). I would also shoutout Hypernote! (https://hyprnote.com/) They might be expanding their model options, as they have shown with OWhisper (https://docs.hyprnote.com/owhisper/what-is-this).
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The issue is > All your data is stored locally on your device, is fundamentally incapable with half of the following sentence. I'd write it as > All your data is stored locally on your device, unless you explicitly decide to use a cloud provider for dictation.
Great correction, wish I could edit the post! Updated the README to reflect this.
Re: Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
The docs are pretty clear that you need to use speaches if you want entirely local operation. https://speaches.ai/
It’s not very clear, rather just a small mention. Given OP’s extensive diatribe about local-first, the fact that it prefers online providers is quite a big miss tbh.
Yeah I agree, I neglected to update the docs and demo. This post was made anticipating the local transcription feature to drop earlier but it took some time due to some bugs. Before, the default option was using Groq for transcription, but that was admittedly before I figured out local transcription and wanted something to work in the meantime. Will be changing local as the default strategy in the documentation.