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Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor

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Re: Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's tons, Parakeet was the last I remember seeing which seemed to gain traction (independent lightweight implementations etc).

I have tried everything (that will run on a 12GB RTX 4070) and I have yet to find anything with better accuracy than Whisper V2 Large for my dataset (discord audio from TTRPG sessions, isolated per-speaker, mostly non-American accents)

Not v3?

Re: Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor

#92

Whisper is the wrong model to benchmark against, or rather, there are better models that are state of the art now like Nemotron and Parakeet both by Nvidia, as well as Mistral's Voxtral and Cohere Transcribe. However, what's funny is, RIP to a lot of the paid apps that simply wrap Whisper, I'm sure Apple will make a native GUI such as a recorder app for macOS that obviates the need for these wrappers, which everyone…

Of these only Parakeet is <1B, it looks better than Apple's model, however it's not builtin. I wonder how it compares on latency and efficiency.

Parakeet is incredibly fast and accurate even on CPU, and it supports streaming now also in TDT3.

Re: Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor

#94
post #64

Whisper is the wrong model to benchmark against, or rather, there are better models that are state of the art now like Nemotron and Parakeet both by Nvidia, as well as Mistral's Voxtral and Cohere Transcribe. However, what's funny is, RIP to a lot of the paid apps that simply wrap Whisper, I'm sure Apple will make a native GUI such as a recorder app for macOS that obviates the need for these wrappers, which everyone…

Also, this test is English-only, while a strong point of other models is to understand different languages without first having to say which one (so you don't need 3 different keyboard shortcuts if you wanna dictate in 3 languages day-to-day)

Does anyone have any experience with Mandarin STT? What's a good model for this? The use-case I have is subtitling of Mandarin speech.

Re: Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor

#95

Whisper is the wrong model to benchmark against, or rather, there are better models that are state of the art now like Nemotron and Parakeet both by Nvidia, as well as Mistral's Voxtral and Cohere Transcribe. However, what's funny is, RIP to a lot of the paid apps that simply wrap Whisper, I'm sure Apple will make a native GUI such as a recorder app for macOS that obviates the need for these wrappers, which everyone…

I hope they replace their awful voice to text on their keyboard. I can't stand that terrible bit of software.

Re: Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor

#96

Whisper is the wrong model to benchmark against, or rather, there are better models that are state of the art now like Nemotron and Parakeet both by Nvidia, as well as Mistral's Voxtral and Cohere Transcribe. However, what's funny is, RIP to a lot of the paid apps that simply wrap Whisper, I'm sure Apple will make a native GUI such as a recorder app for macOS that obviates the need for these wrappers, which everyone…

I’m not sure I agree. There may be better models, but the comparison is still useful so long as whisper is so widely used.

Re: Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor

#97
post #68
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, this test is English-only, while a strong point of other models is to understand different languages without first having to say which one (so you don't need 3 different keyboard shortcuts if you wanna dictate in 3 languages day-to-day)

As an Australian, Apples voice models have always sucked. I've tried using stt (again) more recently and its improved, but i'm so tired of having to Americanize my voice to get it to figure out what the hell i'm saying.

As a Brit, I concur.

Re: Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor

#98
post #64

Whisper is the wrong model to benchmark against, or rather, there are better models that are state of the art now like Nemotron and Parakeet both by Nvidia, as well as Mistral's Voxtral and Cohere Transcribe. However, what's funny is, RIP to a lot of the paid apps that simply wrap Whisper, I'm sure Apple will make a native GUI such as a recorder app for macOS that obviates the need for these wrappers, which everyone…

Also, this test is English-only, while a strong point of other models is to understand different languages without first having to say which one (so you don't need 3 different keyboard shortcuts if you wanna dictate in 3 languages day-to-day)

Reminds me of the time my neighbours must have wondered if I was having some kind of a breakdown when trying out really basic MacOS voice recognition back in the early 2000s. There was a keyboard shortcut and you could say something like "phone number for firstname lastname" and it would theoretically show you that phone number. Thing is it didn't seem to like a British accent, so I spent a good hour trying out different accents, rotating through various US accents, Australian, South African, Canadian and so on. It seemed to respond best to some kind of a melange of Californian / Australian.

Re: Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of these only Parakeet is <1B, it looks better than Apple's model, however it's not builtin. I wonder how it compares on latency and efficiency.

Parakeet is incredibly fast and accurate even on CPU, and it supports streaming now also in TDT3.

Apple likely needed a model that ran on their NPU natively.

- parakeet usually runs on Bfloat16. NPU doesn't support that

- CPU is not as fast as the NPU for these ops on A-series, and even on modern CPUs, there's a latency delay

- Parakeet latency is fine but "fine" may not be good enough for Apple's UX team.

- CPU increases power consumption over dedicated float blocks

So I would say that Parakeet was a non-option for Apple to ship, although it should be in the benchmarks anyways!

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