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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)
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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.
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Scottish Elevator - Voice Recognition - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8
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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
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Thanks for this gem, had a good laugh
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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.
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Fair point! I think it's a tic from being English and having lived in Scotland for quite a while so I autocorrect "English" to "British", but I've over-corrected here. (Also perhaps something to do with "British English").
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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.
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I use Systran/faster-whisper-medium for real-time subtitling, but you need to get used to the context it's used it and the weirdness it translates into. Parakeet has great mandarin>CN text, but running that + a translation model has been tricky and I never got it fast.
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Thank you for this too. I am running in an offline scope so I don't need speed just quality. I'm willing to do it overnight as well if required.
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MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize [0] is by a Chinese team so apparently it's quite good. Try it out here [1].

[0] https://huggingface.co/OpenMOSS-Team/MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize

[1] https://huggingface.co/spaces/OpenMOSS-Team/MOSS-transcribe-...

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Thank you very much.
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I'd also look at the Qwen ASR models, also Chinese made, by Alibaba
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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.
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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.
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It also struggles with my NYC-area accent, which is only medium thick.
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The Two Yoots problem. Do you use d's in place of t's such as dees/dems/dose/dere? I have a heavy queens accent so you'll hear me say things like "deres tree uh dem ova dere."
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Surprised to read this as a Queens thing, this sounds perfectly at home in the Midwest.
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As a Brit, I concur.
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That checks out.
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> 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.

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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.
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I use Parakeet V3 via this tool and it is actually quite reliable for me (in English): https://github.com/cjpais/Handy
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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.
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No, there are better open weight models: https://artificialanalysis.ai/speech-to-text/non-streaming

Apparently MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize is quite good too as it released only a few days ago.

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Agree on this point. Recent anecdotal testing I did found Whisper is still better than Parakeet.
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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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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
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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.
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Any models that can understand thick accents better than I can?

Anytime I’m talking to an Indian on the other end, I have to have them repeat everything 2 or 3 times.

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Apple's own Voice Memos app already does automatic transcription since macOS 15 / iOS 18.
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Speech-to-text is also already built into the keyboard as well, so it can be used in any app where a user would type.
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From my experience, Speech-to-text falls way short of Wispr flow and I would assume the ones that are said to be better than that. It lacks context awareness and formatting
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Whisper v3 is still the best (by far) when it comes to poor quality input (say background audio from a security camera), though remains more susceptible to hallucination so it's a bit of a tradeoff.
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> 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

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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.

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I don’t know how Apple divides computation between the GPU and the Neural Engine, but one major benefit, especially for real-time transcription on laptops, is the improved power and thermal efficiency. I noticed better accuracy after switching my app to SpeechAnalyzer, and I suspect part of that improvement for me came from the microphone no longer having to compete with jet-engine fan noise.
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What Apple laptop has “jet-engine fan noise”?
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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.
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Parakeet is incredibly fast and accurate even on CPU, and it supports streaming now also in TDT3.
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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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Fluidaudio implements Parakeet on ANE. I'd like to know how SpeechAnalyzer compares in speed.

https://github.com/FluidInference/FluidAudio

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Recently contributed a patch to FluidAudio that sped up Parakeet V2 and V3 to 320x and 282x faster than real time, respectively:

https://github.com/FluidInference/FluidAudio/pull/507

That means one hour of audio transcribed in 11.25 and 12.75 seconds.

The Inscribe post doesn't give a speed factor for SpeechAnalyzer. However, this Argmax blog post reports 70:

https://www.argmaxinc.com/blog/apple-and-argmax

Based on that, FluidAudio is ~4.6x and ~4.0x faster.

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Just tried test using yap on a single ~1hr mp3: yap/Speechanalyzer is about 50% slower than fluidaudio on M1. yap interface is nicer though.

https://github.com/finnvoor/yap

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I hope they replace their awful voice to text on their keyboard. I can't stand that terrible bit of software.
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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.
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Presumably the existing transcribe button on the keyboard will route through this on iOS 26?
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One would hope, though I suspect they may want to make things a bit flashier than “we made the audio transcription on the keyboard not terrible” in the changelog given the amount of work that’s gone in.
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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

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Thanks, was looking at a better diarization model.

Even for those sorts of apps, MacParakeet which I've been using is FOSS so no payment needed. In reality these days with AI the ability to spin up a free and/or OSS competitor falls to zero.

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I’m not even using it for diarisation just transcription and it’s amazing. It also doesn’t need a VAD

A new VAD I found though is FireRedVAD which has better benchmark results than TEN and Silero by far

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Is MOSS a streaming model or only for offline? For that VAD how are you integrating it into a model like Whisper etc?
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I'm using it offline. But it's much faster than realtime so it should be usable for streaming. I just asked Codex / Sol to integrate FireRedVAD with Whisper...
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Interesting! And what would you say are MTD top competitors?
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I'm only dealing with Japanese audio so for me it's Anime-Whisper, a Japanese-specific fine-tuning of Qwen3 ASR, and Apple SpeechTranscriber.
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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)

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I am running the MLX fork https://huggingface.co/vanch007/mlx-MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize

Generally labs don't release MLX or ANE versions and we must rely on finding someone who's converted it

Parakeet is not multilingual so not directly comparable

Where do you see 16GB? MOSS is smaller than Parakeet at 1.82GB

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Thanks, I didn't see vanch007 version at first (only ~30 downloads), I usually look at mlx-community. For the size I was looking at the wrong model (TTS not transcribe-diarize), thanks for the corrections.
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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.
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I am curious, what are the use cases people are using voice transcription for?
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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.
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The canadian government will provide lots of historical data for curious citizens, many of which are recordings of interviews from decades and decades ago. For a book project this allows me to make a hours of audio searchable through a GUI application I have developed that has a voxtral backend.
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Turning dialogue audio into text for searchability and accessibility (particularly for deaf users)
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I use handy.computer and it is pretty much everything I want from a transcribing app.
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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.

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> 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 design conventions.

Doing so is literally LESS WORK than trying to make your own custom awful iOS UI.

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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.

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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).

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This particular product used Whisper, so that was obviously the right model to compare it against. Further this is explicitly on device, and Nemotron 3.5, as one example, is 2.5GB for the model.

And if someone were broadly comparing all on-device models (instead of just looking at how this new on-device ones compares to what a specific product uses), Nemotron 3.5's WER are actually a bit higher than what they report for SpeechAnalyzer, for both tests.

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Came here to post this. I use handy on my own machine and it's perfect with parakeet. If I switch to whisper it makes lots of mistakes
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