Comment by arkensaw
5 hours ago
This is great, and I'm not knocking it, but every time I see these apps it reminds me of my phone.
My 2021 Google Pixel 6, when offline, can transcribe speech to text, and also corrects things contextually. it can make a mistake, and as I continue to speak, it will go back and correct something earlier in the sentence. What tech does Google have shoved in there that predates Whisper and Qwen by five years? And why do we now need a 1Gb of transformers to do it on a more powerful platform?
Microsoft OneNote had this back in 2007 or so, granted the speech to text model wasn't nearly as advanced as they are now.
I was actually on the OneNote team when they were transitioning to an online only transcription model because there was no one left to maintain the on device legacy system.
It wasn't any sort of planned technical direction, just a lack of anyone wanting to maintain the old system.
The accuracy is much lower though.
I've switched away from Gboard to Futo on Android and exclusively use MacWhisper on MacOS instead of the default Apple transcription model.
Any particular reason why you switched? I've been using Gboard for years, especially the text to speech in four languages. In the past few weeks, there was an update where the TTS feature is now in a separate "panel" of the keyboard, and it hardly works at all.
In English and Hebrew it stops after half a dozen words, and those words must be spoken slowly and mechanically for it to work at all. Russian and Arabic are right out - I can't coax any coherent sentence out of it.
I've gone through all permutations of relevant settings, such as "Faster Voice Dictation" (translated from Hebrew,I don't know what the original English option is called). I think there used to be an option for Online or Offline transcription, but that option is gone now.
This is ridiculous - I tried to copy the version information and there is no way to copy it in-app. Let's try the S24 OCR feature...
17.0.10.880768217 release-arm64-v8a 175712590 ראשית (en_GB) 2025090100 = גרסה עדכני Primary on-device: No packs Fallback on-device: Packs: ru-RU: 200
I'll try to install the English, Hebrew, and Arabic packs, though I'm certain that I've installed them already.
Interesting. My Pixel 7 transcription is barely usable for me. Makes way too many mistakes and defeats the purpose of me not having to type, but maybe that's just my experience.
The latest open source local STT models people are running on devices are significantly more robust (e.g. whisper models, parakeet models, etc.). So background noise, mumbling, and/or just not having a perfect audio environment doesn't trip up the SoTA models as much (all of them still do get tripped up).
I work in voice AI and am using these models (both proprietary and local open source) every day. Night and day different for me.