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Show HN: Chirp – Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required

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Re: Show HN: Chirp – Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required

#11
post #9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, attempting to perform live dictation is a solution that is looking for a problem. For example, the way I'm writing this comment is: I hold down a keyboard shortcut on my keyboard, and then I just say stuff. And I can say a really long thing. I don't need to see what it's typing out. I don't need to stream the speech-to-text transcription. When the full thing is ingested, I can then release my keys, and…

I’ve been using Parakeet with MacWhisper for a lot of my AI coding interactions. It’s not perfect but generally saves me a lot of time.

I barely use a keyboard for most things anymore.

Re: Show HN: Chirp – Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required

#12
> I’m allowed to run Python, but not install or launch new `.exe` files.

> NVIDIA’s ParakeetV3 model

You can't install .exe's, but you can connect to the Internet, download and install approximately two hundred wheels (judging by uv.lock), many of which contain opaque binary blobs, including an AI model?

Why does your organization think this makes any sense?

Re: Show HN: Chirp – Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required

#13
Here is the huggingface ASR leaderboard for those wondering how parakeet V3 compares to Whisper Large V3

Accuracy Average WER: Whisper-large-v3 4.91 vs Parakeet V3 5.05

Speed RTFx: Whisper-large-v3 126 vs PArakeet V3 2154

~17x faster

https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard

Re: Show HN: Chirp – Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required

#14
I built something similar for macOS that is a CLI app and generates notes for you. Also has a conversational chat interface to query your notes. Funny enough, it’s also called Chirp.

https://github.com/Code-and-Sorts/chirp-ai-note-app

Re: Show HN: Chirp – Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required

#15
Is there a macOS equivalent of this?

My use case is to generate subtitles for Youtube videos (downloaded using yt-dlp). Word-level accurracy is also nice to have, because I also translate them using LLMs and edit the subtitles to better fit the translation.

Re: Show HN: Chirp – Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required

#16

Is there a macOS equivalent of this? My use case is to generate subtitles for Youtube videos (downloaded using yt-dlp). Word-level accurracy is also nice to have, because I also translate them using LLMs and edit the subtitles to better fit the translation.

I use MacWhisper[1] with local Parakeet models. It’s got quite a lot of features, I myself only need the dictation.

[1] https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

Re: Show HN: Chirp – Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required

#17
post #12

> I’m allowed to run Python, but not install or launch new `.exe` files. > NVIDIA’s ParakeetV3 model You can't install .exe's, but you can connect to the Internet, download and install approximately two hundred wheels (judging by uv.lock), many of which contain opaque binary blobs, including an AI model? Why does your organization think this makes any sense?

Never said it did! Working with what I got.

Re: Show HN: Chirp – Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required

#18
post #8

how does the quality compare with the windows built in one (Win+H), the one with online models? I'm using that to dictate prompts, it struggles with technical terms: JSON becomes Jason, but otherwise is fine

In my opinion, attempting to perform live dictation is a solution that is looking for a problem. For example, the way I'm writing this comment is: I hold down a keyboard shortcut on my keyboard, and then I just say stuff. And I can say a really long thing. I don't need to see what it's typing out. I don't need to stream the speech-to-text transcription. When the full thing is ingested, I can then release my keys, and…

Yea whisper has more features and is awesome if you have the hardware to run the big models that are accurate enough. The constraint here is the best cpu only implementation. By no means am I wedded or affiliated with parakeet, it's just the best/fastest within the CPU hardware space.

Re: Show HN: Chirp – Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required

#19
post #4
post #3

I've done something similar for Linux and Mac. I originally used Whisper and then switched to Parakeet. I much prefer whisper after playing with both. Maybe I'm not configuring Parakeet correctly, But the transcription that comes out of Whisper is usually pretty much spot on. It automatically removes all the "ooms" and all the "ahs" and it's just way more natural, in my opinion. I'm using Whisper.CPP with CUDA accele…

Mind sharing your local setup for Mac?

If you don't mind closed source paid app, I can recommend MacWhisper. You can select different models of Whisper & Parakeet for dictation and transcription. My favorite feature is that it allows sending the transcription output to an LLM for clean-up, or anything you want basically eg. professional polish, translate, write poems etc.

I have enough RAM on my Mac that I can run smaller LLMs locally. So for me the whole thing stays local

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