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 seems to be vibe coding these days.

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)

> 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.

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.

Apple's own Voice Memos app already does automatic transcription since macOS 15 / iOS 18.

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.

I hope they replace their awful voice to text on their keyboard. I can't stand that terrible bit of software.

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.

> 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

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.

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

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.

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

I use handy.computer and it is pretty much everything I want from a transcribing app.

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.

> 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.

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).

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.

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