Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

get-inscribe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 251 posts

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

#131

Post by edude03 »

drnick1 wrote: post #48
edude03 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not open weight, but the point is to be an on device (and thus local, privacy preserving) option. The article mentions that as the caveat > What this means if you just want good transcription > If you are on a current iPhone or Mac, the best on-device transcription engine for English is already in the operating system, and the private option is no longer the compromise option

> 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?

The article states:

> If you are on a current iPhone or Mac

Presumably if you don't trust apple you wouldn't purchase their products and even if you were for example forced to use it via work or something you wouldn't use this feature ... so it doesn't really change the calculus as presented by this article - IF you ALREADY HAVE a MODERN Mac (and trust apple) this is your best option

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

#133

Post by EsotericSoft »

dinfinity wrote: post #128
ChadNauseam wrote: post #50

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.

I use Parakeet V3 via this tool and it is actually quite reliable for me (in English): https://github.com/cjpais/Handy

If you are using Parakeet for English only then you should be using V2. V3 is for several languages and is worse at English only.

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

#134

Post by saagarjha »

edude03 wrote: post #69
johncoatesdev wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a IDA Pro decompiler license & MCP server, paired with Codex/Claude Code... it would be a fun side quest.

You likely don't need to disassemble the inference code, the weights are "just an array of numbers" in MLX format.

I believe they are are protected on disk

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

#135

Post by swiftcoder »

FuckButtons wrote: post #117
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…

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.

Presumably the existing transcribe button on the keyboard will route through this on iOS 26?

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

#136

Post by robgough »

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.

I think that's parakeet doing its job there. That is a closer reflection of what you've actually said. The trick is then throwing that output through some additional deterministic and non-deterministic steps to tidy it up however you prefer. It's exactly what I do with my free and open source dictation app (dictator.robgough.net) for Mac+iOS. And of course, everything stays entirely on-device. Gemma E4B is really wonderful for that second step, it's great at language – but takes up 6-7GB RAM.

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

#137

Post by thebruce87m »

frereubu wrote: post #98
jiehong wrote: 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…

Interesting - I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone from the UK refer to talking in a “British accent” before since we are normally aware of the wild regional variations.

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

#138

Post by robgough »

Adrig wrote: post #101
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…

I built my own because I was frustrated with a lot of the free options. Largely because a lot of them had an upsell to be able to do the secondary post-processing step with an LLM. And it wouldn't pick up things like emojis properly or say numbers. Because of that, I left quite a lot of options in there for customising and adding additional steps, etc. Feel free to take a look: dictator.robgough.net

My initial Mac version actually had three additional steps that you could toggle, obviously at the cost of some speed. That is what the website talks about, although nowadays for my own use I've reduced that to just one step and found that it's pretty great. I've got a new version in test to tidy that up, but still lets you define as many steps as you want.

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

#139

Post by john-galts-bro »

Was intrigued by the Inscribe product so I downloaded it to test it out. I uploaded 1 voice file about 4 minutes long and was promptly given a message that I've reached the free plan limits.

Kind of a bait and switch. How can we test the product with such short time limits and what, exactly are you offering if all the processing is done on device by Apple?

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

#140

Post by frereubu »

PyWoody wrote: post #114
frereubu wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not too far off what happened, although thankfully I wasn't actually trying to do anything other than test it. Going to take the opportunity afforded by Scottish TV comedy here, and make a very tenuous link to intercultural exchange so I can post my favourite Rab C Nesbitt scene, hands across the sea indeed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKxPH_QH940
Post reply on HN