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I'm interested in how the transformer based speech recognition from iOS 17 will perform compared to Whisper. I guess it will work more "real-time" like the current dictation on iOS/macOS, but I'm unsure as I am not on the beta right now.

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My guess is the reason that apple invested so heavily in this [0] is because they are going to train a big transformer in their datacenter and apply it as an RNN on your phone.

Superficially, I think this will work very well, but slightly worse than whisper (with the advantage ofc being that its better at real-time transcription).

[0]https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/attention-free-tr...

I am a beta user and I am seriously impressed if I’m being honest. It works fully offline, is multilingual and is fast, even on the non-latest iPhone (I am using an iPhone 12 Pro Max). It is way better than apples previous version and better than locally installed whisper. They’ve done incredible work. Same with the new, transformer-based keyboard on iOS which is way better. And if you type in English, it sometimes shows word suggestions in the text field itself (similar how copilot works in an IDE).

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