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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

This quote is pulled from a TikTok, I recommend watching the whole thing here: https://www.tiktok.com/@belligerentbarbies/video/75683800086...

(I pulled the quote by using yt-dlp to grab the MP4 and then running that through MacWhisper to generate a transcript.)

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It's a little over two paragraphs. Seems like it would have been simpler just to... type it out?

Where's the fun in that? :D

We choose to automate these things, not because they are easy, but because they are an interesting problem to solve

Well if you do it once then yes, but if you automate this process it is different. E.g. I do this with YouTube videos, because watching 14 minutes video or reading 30 seconds summary is time saver. I still watch some videos fully, but many of them are not worth it.

So in summary I think it was just part of automated process (maybe) or it will become one in the future.

But then you would need a Brenda. Ai can write the automation script for you.

Why spend two minutes typing (and realistically longer than that, if I want to capture the exact transcript I would need to keep hitting pause and play and correcting myself) when I can spend ten seconds pasting a URL into my terminal and then dragging and dropping the resulting file onto the MacWhisper window?

I actually transcribed the whole TikTok which was about 50% longer than what I quoted, then edited it down to the best illustrative quote.

Then you spend these 2 minutes to check if a transcript is correct

Checking if a transcript is correct takes massively less time than typing one out in the first place.

Especially since typing a transcript still involves checking that you got it right!

I can see that MacWhisper uses parakeet v2 as the model (although it allows choosing another model).

Is MacWhisper a $60 GUI for a Python script that just runs the model?

> Is MacWhisper a $60 GUI for a Python script that just runs the model?

Yes, a large genre of MacOS apps are "Native GUI wrappers around OSS scripts"

A lot of MacOS itself is this.

Which is incredibly value. The OSS script has zero value to someone who doesn't know it exists or doesn't understand how to run it.

There's also a free version that just uses Whisper. I recommend giving it a go, it's a very well constructed GUI wrapper. I use it multiple times a week, and I've run Whisper on my machine in other less convenient ways in the past.

This may be the first quote from TikTok reposted on a blog, that ends up this high up in HN.

You... could have given the job to Brenda instead, unless the irony was the point?

The global economy isn't going to crash if I make a mistake with the transcript.

That's how it starts.

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