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Transcribro: On-device Accurate Speech-to-text

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Re: Transcribro: On-device Accurate Speech-to-text

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only models that do what you're poking at hostically are 4o (claimed) and that french company with the 7B one. They're also bleeding edge, either unreleased or released and way wilder, ex. The french one interrupts too much, and screams back in an alien language occasionally. Until these, you'd use echo cancellation to try and allow interruptible dialogue, and thats unsolved, you need a consistently cooperative c…

Thank you for your insight. It confirms some of my suspicions working in this area (you wouldn't happen to know anybody who makes anything more modern than the Respeaker 4-mic array?). My biggest problem is even with AEC, the voice output is triggering the VAD and so it continually thinks it's getting interrupted by a human. My next attempt will be to try to only signal true VAD if there's also sound coming from anyw…

I'm not particularly experienced, but I did have good experiences with picovoice's services. It's a business specialised in programmatically available audio, tts, vad services etc.

They have a VAD that is trained on a 10 second clip of -your- voice, and it is then only activated by -your- voice. It works quite well in my experience, although it does add a little bit of additional latency before it starts detecting your voice (which is reasonably easy to overcome by keeping a 1s buffer of voice ready at all times. If the vad is active, just add the past 100-200ms of the buffer to the recorded audio. Works perfectly fine. It's just that the UI showing "voice detected" or "voice not detected" might lag behind 100-200ms)

Source: I worked on a VAD + whisper + LLM demo project this year and ran into some VAD issues myself too.

Re: Transcribro: On-device Accurate Speech-to-text

#42

Seems like Gboard is incompatible with it. Is there a good enough open source alternative to Gboard in 2024 that has smooth glide-typing and a similar layout?

Any of these should work. https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard https://github.com/openboard-team/openboard https://github.com/rkkr/simple-keyboard (guessing, since AOSP Keyboard works and this is a fork) Not open source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/swiftkey Does not have glide/swipe (reserved for symbols), but I just installed and giving it a shot: https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard

My choice is https://github.com/AnySoftKeyboard/AnySoftKeyboard/

It does have glide typing, even.though I don't use it.

It rather uses long-tap to access multiple symbols, and can be split or pushed to a corner on devices with a big screen.

Re: Transcribro: On-device Accurate Speech-to-text

#43
post #2

Accrescent hype is comically overdone.

I looked in the GitHub issues and there's a closed issue for F-droid inclusion. The author states that F-droid "Doesn't meet their requirements" but doesn't elaborate. I wonder what F-droid is missing that they need so much?

Reason https://www.privacyguides.org/en/android/#f-droid

Re: Transcribro: On-device Accurate Speech-to-text

#44
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything like that available for iOS?

iOS already has on-device dictation built into the standard keyboard. Years ago it got sent to the cloud, but as long as you have an iPhone from the past few years it's on-device.

You're right that it exists, but it's complete crap outside a quiet environment. Try to use it while walking around outside or in any semi-noisy area and it fails horribly (iPhone 13, so YMMV if you have a newer one).

You cannot use an iPhone as a dictation device without reviewing the transcribed text, which IMO defeats the purpose of dictation.

Meanwhile, i've gotten excellent results on the iPhone from a Whipser->LLM pipeline.

Re: Transcribro: On-device Accurate Speech-to-text

#45
post #11

Looks similar to the new FUTO keyboard: https://voiceinput.futo.org/

Anything like that available for iOS?

Aiko, mentioned elsewhere, includes a local copy of the OpenAI Whisper model: https://apps.apple.com/app/aiko/id1672085276

Re: Transcribro: On-device Accurate Speech-to-text

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. No more "speaking punctuation". Just talk as normal and it comes out fully formed

I actually don't mind speaking punctuation, in fact it kind of helps. What I really hate is the middle-spot where we are right now, where it tries to place punctuation and sucks badly at it.

In my experience, futo is actually pretty good at just knowing the right punctuation to use.

Re: Transcribro: On-device Accurate Speech-to-text

#48
post #2

Accrescent hype is comically overdone.

I looked in the GitHub issues and there's a closed issue for F-droid inclusion. The author states that F-droid "Doesn't meet their requirements" but doesn't elaborate. I wonder what F-droid is missing that they need so much?

Link: https://github.com/soupslurpr/Transcribro/issues/9

Re: Transcribro: On-device Accurate Speech-to-text

#49
post #2

Accrescent hype is comically overdone.

I looked in the GitHub issues and there's a closed issue for F-droid inclusion. The author states that F-droid "Doesn't meet their requirements" but doesn't elaborate. I wonder what F-droid is missing that they need so much?

F-Droid only packages open-source software and rebuilds it from source, while installing from Accrescent would move all trust to the developer, even if the license changes to proprietary.

I understand that the author trusts itself more than F-Droid, but as a user the opposite seems more relevant.

Re: Transcribro: On-device Accurate Speech-to-text

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not streaming in the way people normally use this term. It's a fuzzy notion but typically streaming means something encompassing: - Processing and emitting results on something closer to word by word level - Allowing partial results while the user is still speaking and mid-segment - Not relying on an external segmenter to determine the chunking (and therefore also latency) of the output.

This is fascinating because if your hint in another comment indicates you worked on this at Google, it's entirely possible I have this all wrong because I'm missing the actual ML part - I wrote the client encoder & server decoder for Opus and the client-side UI for the SODA launch, and I'm honestly really surprised to hear Google has different stuff. The client-side code loop AGSA used is 100% replicated, in my exper…

Something to keep an eye on is that Whisper is strongly bound to processing a 30-second window at a time. So if you send it 30 seconds of audio, and it decodes it, then you send it another one second of audio, the only sensible way it can work is to have it reprocess seconds 2s-30s in addition to the new data at 31s. If there was a way to have it just process the update, then there's every possibility it could avoid a lot of work.

I suspect that's what people are getting at by saying it's "not streaming": it's built as a batch process but, under some circumstances, you can run it fast enough to get away with pretending that it isn't.

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