> Siri/iOS-Dictation is truly good when it comes to understanding the speech.

What...? It is terrible, even compared to Whisper Tiny, which was released years ago under an Apache 2.0 license so Apple could have adopted it instantly and integrated it into their devices. The bigger Whisper models are far better, and Parakeet TDT V2 (English) / V3 (Multilingual) are quite impressive and very fast.

I have no idea what would make someone say that iOS dictation is good at understanding speech... it is so bad.

For a company that talks so much about accessibility, it is baffling to me that Apple continues to ship such poor quality speech to text with their devices.

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derefr 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe they have exactly the accent iOS dictation was trained to recognize.

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fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Terrible? It's fine. What's your accent that it's terrible? It even pulls last names from my address book and spells them right.

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coder543 an hour ago | parent [-]

Terrible relative to everything else that exists today. I have a neutral American accent.

Maybe you just don’t know what you’re missing? Google’s default speech to text is still bad compared to Whisper and Parakeet, but even Google’s is markedly better than Apple’s.

I cannot think of a single speech to text system that I’ve run into in the past 5 years that is less accurate than the one Apple ships.

Sure, Apple’s speech to text is incredible compared to what was on the flip phone I had 20 years ago. Terrible is relative. Much better options exist today, and they’re under very permissive licenses. Apple’s refusal to offer a better, more accessible experience to their users is frustrating when they wouldn’t even have to pay a licensing fee to ship something better. Whisper was released under a permissive license nearly 4 years ago.

Apple also restricts third party keyboards to an absurdly tiny amount of memory, so it isn’t even possible to ship a third party keyboard that provides more accurate on-device speech to text without janky workarounds (requiring the user to open the keyboard's own app first each time).

	▲	CamJN 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		As someone who tried every TTS in existance a few years ago for some product work, Apple’s is so consistantly better that we wound up getting a bunch of apple stuff just for the TTS.