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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

#101

Post by Adrig »

satvikpendem wrote: post #34

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…

> RIP to a lot of the paid apps that simply wrap Whisper

I started using a few open source apps for transcription and eventually subscribed to a paid one...

On paper, it's not hard to compete, but for this use case, a few rough edges make it really frustrating to use. Like a keyboard that sometimes doubles the letter "e"

Automatic dictionary, seamless language switch, no issues with accents, etc... Putting the effort in the last mile makes a world of difference.

If anyone has better options, I'm willing to have a look. The best open source solution I found was Handy, and I currently use Wispr Flow

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

#102

Post by verelo »

louthy wrote: post #97
verelo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That checks out.

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

#103

Post by permalac »

satvikpendem wrote: post #34

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…

Hey. Yes. I did vive code one as an exercise yo learn how to publish to apple store.

Listen and transcribe felt like the easiest thing to do.

Distavo.com

The source is open for anyone to use, and the builds are in github.

I found quite interesting that claude didn't help too much on how to publish to SetApp until Fable.

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

#105

Post by mchusma »

I will plug Willow for mac recording. IMO it's basically to me a "better than perfect transcription" as it cleans things up and is almost instant. I liked Superwhisper but switched to Willow as it was a big difference.

Its so good that I'm not sure that it's possible to get any better. Speech to text seems like basically a solved problem, if not now then definitely in 5 years. I don't know if any of these speech to text businesses will work in the long run, but for consumers they are great. My guess is the 2030 version of Apple's SpeechAnalyzer will be so good that nobody will need to use 3rd party software.

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

#107

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

bellowsgulch wrote: post #85
satvikpendem wrote: post #34

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…

> 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 seems to be vibe coding these days. What's insane to me is that you have all of these low-quality me-too apps, and literally no one could bother to read the damn Human Interface Guidelines or follow iOS desi…

Not if your app is a Web wrapper, which so many of these are.

If you use SwiftUI (the native recommendation by Apple), it severely penalizes you, if you want to paint outside the lines (which is a big reason that I don't use SwiftUI for shipping apps). It's insanely easy to write a native app that is 100% in line with HIG.

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

#108

Post by foobarqux »

parl_match wrote: post #99
hendersoon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fluidaudio implements Parakeet on ANE. I'd like to know how SpeechAnalyzer compares in speed.

https://github.com/FluidInference/FluidAudio

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

#109

Post by foobarqux »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #41
satvikpendem wrote: post #34

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…

For multilingual and noisy audio the best right now is MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize which was released just a few days ago Superwhisper does a lot more than just provide a whisper/parakeet UI so I’m not sure Apple will destroy them so easily

16GB! (edit: this is wrong, I was looking at TTS, the transcribe model is 1.7GB). Compared to Parakeet 2.3GB (but no diarization).

Also doesn't seem to be tailored to Apple hardware (i.e. no MLX or ANE variant/implementation)

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

#110

Post by obmelvin »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #50
satvikpendem wrote: post #34

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…

> there are better models that are state of the art now like Nemotron and Parakeet both by Nvidia Is parakeet state of the art? It always transcribes speech fragments for me, like if I stutter and say "m-m-m-map" parakeet will dutifully transcribe "m m m map". Which I guess could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you want. Whisper does not do that however. I do like cohere transcribe a lot.

Parakeet is certainly faster on my machine (m3 max), but I can't stand using it over Whisper for dictating my prompts. It makes a lot more mistakes, possibly because (like you mentioned) large portions of the speech will pause / stutter as I think about what to include.

With whisper v3 turbo, I can almost always live with the few mistakes because the overall stream-of-thought word-salad I provide is still clear at a high level. The bits and pieces of context seem to help, that I might leave out if typing and focused more on traditional conciseness / clean writing. With parakeet, I needed to do frequent editing even for shorter bits of speech.

I realize some applications prioritize the latency.

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