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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

#111

Finally. I‘d be delighted though if they actually implemented language autodetection (like everywhere else) though. There’s little more frustrating in my day to day than having dictated half a page to find that it‘s complete gibberish because Apple forces you to select the right language first…

Same with the keyboard. Apple is completely incapable of taking context into account for the input mechanisms of the operating system.

If I start typing and the existing text is in Spanish, then a sensible default is to select the Spanish keyboard I have installed and let me adjust otherwise.

App developers should also be allowed to supply mini-dictionaries within a context to allow autocorrect to work correctly in that context, so for example in this thread [SpeechAnalyzer, API, Whisper, Parakeet, Nemotron] should be supplied so that these terms are autocorrected.

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

#112

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…

How many of the Whisper competitors will work at a reasonable speed using only CPU (on Linux, not Apple)?

(Genuine question - I'm a happy Whisper user but am always looking for improvements).

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It sounds like post processing should be the job of an LLM. I would like the voice model to be faithful to what was said and then that output can be smoothed over or postprocessed as needed for the use case

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

#114
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)

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 diffe…

Scottish Elevator - Voice Recognition - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8

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

#117

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…

Yeah, apple will be optimizing a model to work on ANE and then turn it into a native app. My only hope is that it has a reasonable api so that I can use that as a generic input source across iOS / macOS that’s equivalent to the ubiquity of the keyboard.

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

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It sounds like post processing should be the job of an LLM. I would like the voice model to be faithful to what was said and then that output can be smoothed over or postprocessed as needed for the use case

To be clear, I'm talking about high word error rate with parakeet vs whisper, not post processing and cleaning up my speech. Re: being faithful to what was said, one small example, Whisper will often put ellipses when I pause.

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

#119
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not open weight, but the point is to be an on device (and thus local, privacy preserving) option. How can you be sure this isn't leaking data or metadata to Apple? Can Apple really be trusted?

Test it! Does it make network requests? Unplug the internet and see if it still works!

You are being naive. An Apple device makes dozens of network requests every minute or so to Apple. It is neigh on impossible to verify what is being requested or sent. Also unplugging the Internet and verifying that something still works does not mean the app won't phone home behind your back when it can. These things are designed to fail silently.

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

#120

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 use handy.computer and it is pretty much everything I want from a transcribing app.
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