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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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