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Comment by scuppernong | Hacker News Reader

Just ran it against Whisper-Large-V2 on a math lecture (my primary use case for ASR is subtitling math lectures), and it was substantially faster and only slightly worse. Very usable for live transcription though I'll probably stick with whisper for the time being since I don't really need the subtitles to be generated in real time.

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Been using it for a podcast app I have been developing for half a year lol (I hope I publish it by version 27) and I can confirm it’s real fast.

Splitting the audio in multiple segments and firing it up without hitting the maximum limit of concurrent decoding streams makes it blazing fast. Fair enough you loose the cut, but it’s good enough for just podcast. In one minute it chews through one hour of audio. This on an iPhone 17 Pro.

You could perhaps run over the segment splitting points (plus a few seconds back and forward) in a second batch then merge the results in the end so you don't miss anything.

You probably know that already, but there's a great ATP episode about using Apple's models for podcast transcribing at scale for Overcast.app (https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/04/07/giant-mac-mini-cl...)

What's different about your podcast app?

Nothing really, except that I get to play with SpeechAnalyzer APIs, foundation models, translations. It’s basically my playground where to try all things. Been listening a lot of Chinese podcasts lately, transcribed and translated by local models.

Edit: all that said, the app is irrelevant. What I want to say is that live transcripts on iOS using Apples frameworks works very well. Only thing I miss is diarization support.

If it was faster but worse, maybe compare it to a smaller whisper model?

I imagine because quality of transcription is what matters.

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