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

201–210 of 251 posts

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

#201

Post by [deleted] »

seviu wrote: post #33
scuppernong wrote: post #14

Just ran it against Whisper-Large-V2 on a math lecture (my primary use case for ASR is subtitling math lectures), and it was substantially faster and only slightly worse. Very usable for live transcription though I'll probably stick with whisper for the time being since I don't really need the subtitles to be generated in real time.

Been using it for a podcast app I have been developing for half a year lol (I hope I publish it by version 27) and I can confirm it’s real fast. Splitting the audio in multiple segments and firing it up without hitting the maximum limit of concurrent decoding streams makes it blazing fast. Fair enough you loose the cut, but it’s good enough for just podcast. In one minute it chews through one hour of audio. This on a…

[deleted]

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

#202

Post by NegativeLatency »

tcoff91 wrote: post #176
mchusma wrote: post #105

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 t…

What isn't solved is domain-specific jargon with these tools. When i talk to my coding agent, i want to be able to speak the names of symbols and files and have it be aware of that stuff, like having LSP integration. If I say 'useSuspenseQuery' I want it to come out as useSuspenseQuery not 'use suspense query'. Even if I had to say 'symbol useSuspenseQuery' to give a hint that i'm referencing a symbol, that would be…

Tried running it through something that knows what you're working on?

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

#203

Post by fn-mote »

jlund-molfese wrote: post #147
jasondigitized wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious, what are the use cases people are using voice transcription for?

I find voice memos really annoying, so I’ve been dropping them into a Whisper frontend for a while. Something built into the OS would be nicer though.

Pretty sure iOS is providing this? At least for messages and voicemail.

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

#204

Post by jlund-molfese »

fn-mote wrote: post #203
jlund-molfese wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find voice memos really annoying, so I’ve been dropping them into a Whisper frontend for a while. Something built into the OS would be nicer though.

Pretty sure iOS is providing this? At least for messages and voicemail.

Yup but on third party apps, where you can download an mp3, there is not always a built-in transcription option

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

#205

Post by daniel_iversen »

How would it compare to Wispr Flow? I recently started using it and it feels so much more robust than anything out there (and in fact the one in iOS and MacOS 26 seemed pretty poor in comparison)... and do we know if Wispr Flow uses the Whisper tech behind the scenes or if they have their own model etc?

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

#206

Post by Freddy153 »

I have implemented this into Home Assustant some months (https://github.com/FI-153/wyoming-apple-stt). I find the comparison with Whisper particularly helpful since it is the base model used in Home Assistant to transcribe voice in the Assist pipeline. I find Whisper too heavy to run locally with good quality, SpeechAnalyzer instead comes bundled in macOS and is always available.

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

#208

Post by Barbing »

vlovich123 wrote: post #197
jermaustin1 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Texan first, American second, I sympathize with this statement. Siri can't understand me probably 25% of the time. I use STT for iMessage while in the car, and half the time it will take 3+ times to either get it right or me give up, and hope to remember to text them by hand when I next stop.

What does this mean? When I pledged my oath to become a citizen, I had to promise to put America above all other allegiances. Is it in relation to allegiance in the general sense or some weird statement that only relates to STT?

When they say everything's bigger in Texas, maybe that includes the patriotism.

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

#209

Post by thefourthchime »

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…

I'm curious how well it'll work in the real world, but I would be ecstatic if I could ditch all my Whisper apps.

- transcribed using MacWhisper.

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

#210

Post by Barbing »

robgough wrote: post #136
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 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 won…

Oh yeah, this one’s worth hyperlinking

https://dictator.robgough.net

Great work Rob! Indeed private as promised per App Privacy Report, “Domains contacted directly by app”:

  cas-bridge.xethub.hf.co; huggingface.co; mzstorekit.itunes.apple.com
Site could identify our device and send iOS visitors to the iOS page (or maybe that’s against the vibe and we should tap it ourselves).

App might be able to launch the keyboard settings directly but I suppose Apple doesn’t like devs using those undocumented URIs (uhg but maybe can understand part of it).

Keyboard, given manual app switchbacking + manual pasting, is less convenient for some of my use cases compared to an action button shortcut. (Reference Spokenly w/Local-Only Mode.)

Separating dictation and the history, and having a syncable scratch pad, are some welcome innovations!

>Gemma E4B … takes up 6-7GB RAM.

Google has a spyware-adjacent dictation app (maybe not really, but they demand to connect to servers after you enable their offline toggle). Just like yours, they thought of a cute name too (Google AI Edge Eloquent). Do you know what language model they install on the iPhone? Not a very good one but I’m sure over the next year or two…

Post reply on HN