I've been running whisper large-v3 on an m2 max through a self-hosted endpoint and honestly the accuracy is good enough that i stopped bothering with cleanup models. The bigger annoyance for me was latency on longer chunks, like anything over 30 seconds starts feeling sluggish even with metal acceleration. Haven't tried whisperkit specifically but curious how it handles longer audio compared to the full model.

Thanks for sharing! I was literally getting ready to build, essentially, this. Now it looks like I don't have to!

Have you ever considered using a foot-pedal for PTT?

Apple incidentally already has native STT, but for some reason they just don't use a decent model yet.

Whisper is very good in many languages.

It's also in many flavours, from tiny to turbo, and so can fit many system profiles.

That's what makes it unique and hard to replace.

Whisper is still old reliable - I find that it's less prone to hallucinations than newer models, easier to run (on AMD GPU, via whisper.cpp), and only ~2x slower than parakeet. I even bothered to "port" Parakeet to Nemo-less pytorch to run it on my GPU, and still went back to Whisper after a couple of days.

same, even have kokoro for speech back to text for home assistant and parakeet on mac os through voice ink.

Also vibe coded a way to use parakeet from the same parakeet piper server on my grapheneos phone https://zach.codes/p/vibe-coding-a-wispr-clone-in-20-minutes

I haven't used this one but WisprFlow is vastly better than the built-in functionality on MacOS. Apple is way behind even startups, even for fundamental AI functionality like transcribing speech

I’d also be interested to know what the impetus was for developing ghost-pepper, which looks relatively recent, given that Handy exists and has been pretty well received.

Extra bonus is that Handy lets add an automatic LLM post-processor. This is very handy for the Parakeet V3 model, which can sometimes have issues where it repeats words or makes recognition errors for example, duplicating the recognition of a single word a dozen dozen dozen dozen dozen dozen dozen dozen times.

Handy is awesome! I used it for quite a while before Claude Code added voice support. Solid software, very good linux and mac integration. Shoutout to Parakeet models as well, extremely fast and solid models for their relatively modest memory requirements.

I love and have been using handy for a while too, what we need is this for mobile apps I don't think there's any free apps and native dictation is not always fully local and not as good.

Handy is fantastic.

Whisper supports a prompt, you can put your "Donold" there.

https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/examples/whisper_prom...

I've found the "corrections" feature works well for most of the jargon and misspelling use cases. Can you give it a try and let me know edge cases?

Right, and if you're on MacOS you can use it for free with Hex: https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex

Are you running Parakeet with VoiceInk[0]?

[0]: https://github.com/beingpax/VoiceInk

And indeed, Ghost Pepper supports parakeet v3

I have been using Parakeet with MacWhisper's hold-to-talk on a MacBook Neo and it's been awesome.

Slop

Sure, Chatterbox TTS Server is rather high quality: https://github.com/devnen/Chatterbox-TTS-Server

You could hook it up to some workflow over the local API depending on how you want to dump the text, but the web UI is good too.

The Show HN by the author was at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44145564

I like this idea and it should work -- whatever microphone you have on should be able to hear the speaker. LMK if not (e.g., are you wearing headphones? if so, the mic can't hear the speaker)

And many people are mailing in Codex and Claude Code generated PRs - myself included. Fingers crossed, I suppose.

Exactly my question. I double-tap the control button and macOS does native, local TTS dictation pretty well. (Similar to Keyboard > Enable Dictation setting on iOS.)

The macOS built-in TTS (dictation) seems better than all the 3rd party, local apps I tried in the past that people raved about. I have tried several.

Is this better somehow?

If the 3rd party apps did streaming with typing in place and corrections within a reasonable window when they understand things better given more context, that would be cool. Theoretically, a custom model or UX could be "better" than what comes free built into macOS (more accurate or customizable).

But when I contacted the developer of my favorite one they said that would be pretty hard to implement due to having to go back and make corrections in the active field, etc.

I assume streaming STT in these utilities for Mac will get better at some point, but I haven't seen it yet (been waiting). It seems these tools generally are not streaming, e.g. they want you to finish speaking first before showing you anything. Which doesn't work for me when I'm dictating. I want to see what I've been saying lately, to jog my memory about what I've just said and help guide the next thing I'm about to say. I certainly don't want to split my attention by manually toggling the control (whether PTT or not) periodically to indicate "ok, you can render what I just said now".

I guess "hold-to-talk" tools are for delivering discrete, fully formed messages, not for longer, running dictation.

AFAICT, TFA is focused on hold-to-talk as the differentiator, over double-tap to begin speaking and double-tap to end speaking?

Thanks! We currently have 2 multi-lingual options available: - Whisper small (multilingual) (~466 MB, supports many languages) - Parakeet v3 (25 languages) (~1.4 GB, supports 25 languages via FluidAudio)