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Comment by GavinMcG | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t used MacOS native dictation, but I thought it could be used anywhere text could be input. Does your script have different functionality?

Edit: looks like Mac native runs locally only with dapple Silicon, and maybe has a more limited geographic/linguistic reach?

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- MacOS native dictation, in my experience, is slow to start up (indeterminate delay after pressing the dictation key)

- The accuracy is decent but the vocabulary is very limited. With Whisper, you can customize the prompt to include industry-specific terms and acronyms.

See my example from the repo. Apple recognizes:

> Popular Linux distributions include Debby and Fed or Linux, and do Bantu. You can use windowing systems such as X eleven or Weiland with a desktop environment like KD plasma.

Whisper recognizes:

> Popular Linux distributions include Debian, Fedora, Linux, and Ubuntu. You can use windowing systems such as X11 or Wayland with a desktop environment like KDE Plasma.

To everyone saying the betas are better, no sir:

Popular Lennox distributions include Debbie and Fedora, Lennox, and Beau you can use windowing system such as X11 or Whelan with a desktop environment like Katy plasma

Just tried the MacOS one, here's my nearly worthless result:

Popular Linux distributions include Devion fedora Linux and a bunch to you can we use when doing system such as excellent Wayland with a desktop environment like Katie plasma.

This captures the exact type of problem I have when using Siri for my shopping list.

macOS native dictation is not as good as Whisper in terms of accuracy, however that is probably going to change with macOS Sonoma since they will switch the model for speech recognition to a better one (Transformer based iirc).

I'm on the Sonoma beta and can confirm it's miles better

Better than whisper? I am running whisper.cpp locally on my Ventura. Should I update to Sonoma?

Better than dictation used to be on MacOS. I tried some whisper-based stuff, but it lacks the integration that the built-in dictation has (so I don't have to dictate somewhere else and copy/paste). It seems in the same ballpark as whisper, but I haven't done a comparison.

Was it ever addressed that even when you had the microphone turned off it could still detect audial stimuli and reflected that in the oscillating sound wave visual? Makes me wonder if it was/is always listening even with Hey Siri disabled

That "sounds" to me like the mic was properly cut off electrically, but the rest of the system as active, so you'd get electrical noise coming in. E.g., the mic and amp are powered down, but the ADC is still active.

My old Sun Ultra 40 M2 had a ton of electrical noise on my headphone jack, and I could def. tell when the CPU was busy from what I was hearing.

I meant like, even after toggling it off when you made noise or spoke, there was a visual representation/feedback for that shown in the wavy graph thing. Not just ambient/moving parts type noise. Just thought it was weird, never really thought about it too much.

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