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Comment by leodriesch | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

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