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Comment by jiehong | Hacker News Reader

Also, this test is English-only, while a strong point of other models is to understand different languages without first having to say which one (so you don't need 3 different keyboard shortcuts if you wanna dictate in 3 languages day-to-day)

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Reminds me of the time my neighbours must have wondered if I was having some kind of a breakdown when trying out really basic MacOS voice recognition back in the early 2000s. There was a keyboard shortcut and you could say something like "phone number for firstname lastname" and it would theoretically show you that phone number. Thing is it didn't seem to like a British accent, so I spent a good hour trying out different accents, rotating through various US accents, Australian, South African, Canadian and so on. It seemed to respond best to some kind of a melange of Californian / Australian.

Scottish Elevator - Voice Recognition - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8

Not too far off what happened, although thankfully I wasn't actually trying to do anything other than test it. Going to take the opportunity afforded by Scottish TV comedy here, and make a very tenuous link to intercultural exchange so I can post my favourite Rab C Nesbitt scene, hands across the sea indeed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKxPH_QH940

Thanks for this gem, had a good laugh

Interesting - I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone from the UK refer to talking in a “British accent” before since we are normally aware of the wild regional variations.

Fair point! I think it's a tic from being English and having lived in Scotland for quite a while so I autocorrect "English" to "British", but I've over-corrected here. (Also perhaps something to do with "British English").

They were probably mainly wondering why you were doing this at their place instead of your own!

Does anyone have any experience with Mandarin STT? What's a good model for this? The use-case I have is subtitling of Mandarin speech.

MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize [0] is by a Chinese team so apparently it's quite good. Try it out here [1].

[0] https://huggingface.co/OpenMOSS-Team/MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize

[1] https://huggingface.co/spaces/OpenMOSS-Team/MOSS-transcribe-...

Thank you very much.

I'd also look at the Qwen ASR models, also Chinese made, by Alibaba

I use Systran/faster-whisper-medium for real-time subtitling, but you need to get used to the context it's used it and the weirdness it translates into. Parakeet has great mandarin>CN text, but running that + a translation model has been tricky and I never got it fast.

Thank you for this too. I am running in an offline scope so I don't need speed just quality. I'm willing to do it overnight as well if required.

I run it offline too, don't want to depend on separate services.

I use TranscriptionSuite, which is focused on offline transcription, and supports Parakeet as well as whisper and others (https://github.com/homelab-00/TranscriptionSuite) The dev was sweet enough to improve the live mode GUI so that I and some friends can use it when playing on Chinese mmo servers.

As an Australian, Apples voice models have always sucked. I've tried using stt (again) more recently and its improved, but i'm so tired of having to Americanize my voice to get it to figure out what the hell i'm saying.

It also struggles with my NYC-area accent, which is only medium thick.

The Two Yoots problem. Do you use d's in place of t's such as dees/dems/dose/dere? I have a heavy queens accent so you'll hear me say things like "deres tree uh dem ova dere."

Surprised to read this as a Queens thing, this sounds perfectly at home in the Midwest.

Yah thats definitely Minnesota, eh?

Oh jeez

It's spoken fast with a nasal tone.

As a Texan first, American second, I sympathize with this statement. Siri can't understand me probably 25% of the time. I use STT for iMessage while in the car, and half the time it will take 3+ times to either get it right or me give up, and hope to remember to text them by hand when I next stop.

What does this mean? When I pledged my oath to become a citizen, I had to promise to put America above all other allegiances. Is it in relation to allegiance in the general sense or some weird statement that only relates to STT?

I took it to mean “as someone with a Texas accent”

When they say everything's bigger in Texas, maybe that includes the patriotism.

Texans (generally) consider themselves Texans firsts. Similar to born and raised New Yorkers (NYC). That said, I really meant it tongue-in-cheek that my accent was too thick, and doesn't work well for Siri's STT model. ChatGPT's does way better, but I really don't like talking to an LLM.

Yeah, but I had my fingers crossed behind my back. I hail from, and only stand for, the Republic Of Scouse.

(and if you think Texans have it bad regarding being understood, try being a Scouser [1])

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ5Isx6Hi0E

As a Brit, I concur.

That checks out.

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