[ChadNauseam]

> 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.

[robgough]

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.

[Barbing]

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…

[robgough]

I appreciate the kind words. Thank you.

I really wanted to have background audio and make it so the keyboard would directly record audio etc, but my first pass didn't make it through app review (and that was just keeping background audio listening AFTER you'd already started a recording). I could maybe have fought it, but figured if I was already butting up against app review there was little point as they'd likely reject in a future release anyway.

Re: analytics, It is quite weird having no idea how many people are using the app. It does leave you a little blind, but I figure people will get in touch if they have big enough problems with it.

For the Google app, I believe Gemma E2B and E4B both have audio input, so I suspect they're using one of those.

[Barbing]

Analytics: if you generate them on my device, and bury an option to manually send them to you when I have a bug--or...

you instead bury an opt-in to automatic telemetry, and let us CC ourselves each ~month when the analytics get sent in to you (so we can verify it's all boring data)...

It's hard for me not to opt in to stuff like that, at least periodically. If I'm opted-in by default? Ehhhhh.... I totally get it, weird "flying blind" (quoting a different dev w/similar philosophy), but I guess I'm still weird myself and hence looking for that autonomy or something? Oh and if somebody makes something opt in, and then certainly if they furthermore stick the option somewhere slightly off the beaten path, that seems pretty darn trustworthy.

(I wonder if we'd have enough public data for a decent statistician to calculate a likely number range of how many users you have by extrapolating from the 1% to 10% or 20% of users who'd chose to opt in...)

PS: "bury" concept likely not actually important :)

[dinfinity]

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

[EsotericSoft]

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.

[parentheses]

Agree on this point. Recent anecdotal testing I did found Whisper is still better than Parakeet.

[satvikpendem]

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.

[obmelvin]

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.

[Barbing]

The near-instantaneous nature of Parakeet has led me to keep using it and occasionally simply re-dictating a second time as needed.

For round two after a typo-laden transcript, I’m dictating and annunciating with great passion as I read the first transcript to make sure I don’t miss a beat. It’s kind of fun because it’s a little performance.

[solenoid0937]

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

[obmelvin]

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.