Comment by raajg
1 month ago
I've been dabbling with STT quite a bit and built my own tool using Deepgram. But just tried Handy and it's SO FREAKING FAST! Love it.
1 month ago
I've been dabbling with STT quite a bit and built my own tool using Deepgram. But just tried Handy and it's SO FREAKING FAST! Love it.
Hex is my new favorite STT on MacOS. Also uses Parakeet V3. I didn't think it could possibly be faster than Handy, but it is much faster - even long ramblings transcribed within a second. It's MacOS only, leverages the CoreML / Apple Neural Engine.
https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex
Also the transcriptions with hex don't seem to suffer from some of the issues with Handy, such as stutter.
For local speech-to-text, Whisper remains the gold standard - you can run it locally with good accuracy across languages. For speech-to-speech, you'd typically chain Whisper with a local TTS model like Coqui TTS or use something like Tortoise TTS for higher quality but slower processing. The key is balancing accuracy, speed, and resource usage based on your specific use case. If you're doing content creation workflows, consider what post-processing you might need - sometimes the raw transcription needs structure and enhancement beyond just accurate words.
+1 on the post-processing point. Raw Whisper output is ~90% there but punctuation, grammar, and formatting are the missing piece.
I built MumbleFlow to address exactly this — whisper.cpp for STT plus llama.cpp for smart text cleanup, all running on-device. Metal/CUDA accelerated, sub-second latency on Apple Silicon. Global hotkey works in any app.
$5 one-time, no cloud, no subscription. https://mumble.helix-co.com
Yes especially with Parakeet V3. It’s also nicely hackable, I Clauded a couple PRs to improve the experience, like removing stutters and filler words.