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Comment by nubg | Hacker News Reader

How does it compare to MacWhisper?

MacWhisper crashes at about an hour of context. This uses, smart, invisible regex in the text generation pipe. Makes this fast. + bonus, there is no context limit

Smart invisible regex makes it fast and prevents it from crashing? What does that mean?

I've done 3+hours with MacWhisper without issue? One downside is the transcription is not real time - can Scriber Pro do realtime?

I haven't worked in a while with transcription, but whisper.cpp itself (which I assume is the underlying tech behind MacWhisper) does realtime transcription on my MBP with an M1 Pro chip. When I first started writing my last completed novel, I fired it up and just started telling the story to test it out. Realtime.

That was back in 2023. I assume things work better now.

"Smart, invisible regex" sounds like a lot of bs... could you give a more technical explanation?

Also the Whisper model doesn't really have a context window, it already segments the audio with a certain amount of overlap between the chunks, I really have a hard time understanding what you are trying to say here.

Whisper will fail > 99%* (edit, most of the time) of the time at lengths over 90 minutes and fairly high over one hour.

This is just plain wrong. I have my own Whisper App in the AppStore (on iOS, with very limited memory capacity) and there are no problems at all with longer Audio / Video files.

I've never had whisper complete a single attempt a anything over 75 min

This is absolutely not my experience. I regularly (weekly at least) use whisper for 90-120 minutes pieces of content and only rarely have problems.

I’ve used whisper-cop on 5-hour podcasts without problems.

Would also love to hear what you mean by “smart invisible regex,” sounds like AI slop to me.

Can't really declare that without declaring which whisper model in particular you are referring to, as there are a number of them

What do you mean context limit?

Neither whisper nor MacWhisper have any context limit

> MacWhisper crashes at about an hour of context.

This is not true. (I've been a MacWhisper user since 2023. I have two bugs during that time, which the author addressed quickly.)

I am a MacWhisper Pro user, and I successfully transcribed and translated a 15-hour course inside the app without any issues

> Smart invisible regex

I've never heard a regex person speak this way of a regex.

Please tell me you didn't vibecode the regex... one of the areas it's still not good at

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