I don't think the challenge with speech to text was size of the binary. In my experience the challenge is understanding my 84 year old Croatian father with a sagging mouth after a stroke, when he's trying to write his autobiography.
I just setup Windows speech to text for him last week and it's great to see how he can write an entire page in 10 minutes, it would take him days using the keyboard.
But every single sound he makes with his mouth ends up on the page too.
Sorry about your father. He needs a dictation model, not a general purpose speech-to-text model. They ignore umms and ahhs, change things like “an elephant, no a monkey, went up the tree” to “a monkey went up the tree,” support saying punctuation aloud sometimes, etc.
For essentially infinite and fast dictation I use https://github.com/cjpais/Handy on Parakeet streaming (cohere is far better, but slower and has a token output limit so you cant ramble for many minutes). And then just do a cleanup pass with a cheap LLM, it will in my experience, do far better than trying to voice control to go edit a sentence or change words. I just weave instructions into my writing. I understand this requires technical know-how, but for those with it, this is the best solution I have found to long form writing without my hands.
Another plug for Handy, and wanted to share something cool about it.
You can set it "Push to talk" mode (like a walkie-talkie radio), and when you're done talking and release the button, it can paste the text into any text field.
You can even replicate ChatGPT voice conversation mode, by having Handy as your speech input, and then (I forgot the extension) enabling a speech-to-text model for OpenCode. Surprisingly relaxing flow for certain tasks, like tweaking a website's styles.
+1 for handy and then using LLM's for the cleanup pass, though what are your observations on feeling as if sharing that output though?
Because I have seemingly mixed opinions on it, on one hand, I did put the effort but on the other, the output is AI generated so I am unsure about sharing it with others (because they might think its AI generated)
Do you use it for very small edits (removing just the uhhm's?) or for slightly more edits.
The way that I use it sometimes is that while thinking, I will write something which can sometimes make me feel as if a better re-write can better explain my thoughts or rephrasing it as such. For example. I will think about X topic, connect it to Y, then try to add some more points about X again.
I found LLM's to do a really decent job at generating the final outputs as such, but as I said, I am left sometimes feeling a little confused as to sharing it or not because of it being AI generated and the end user not knowing if I put an actual effort into creation of it or not.
Should I try to share the actual transcript of it as well, I really wish if some good ethics and internet ettiquette could be established about it.
I've been using Gemini Desktop App purely for dictation. It's a miracle! For the first time in my life I'm blown away by the quality of my (heavy accent) speech recognition. Just be sure to disable the "speak to window -> reasoning" option to make it purely dictation and stop from writing whole emails for you.
I hope you will find a solid solution for your father.
I was researching STT for people with speech disorders two years ago and essentially everything was boiling down to three problems at the end of the day - data scarcity, irregularity of way of speaking and thus constant ambiguity in translation, and individual differences in speech patterns among patients.
There are many different challenges, each requiring their own solution. I, for one, really miss the old Google Assistant on my Android phone. It would very reliably play most songs that I wanted to hear on Spotify. Gemini fails at this almost every time, and is significantly slower. It's actually a difficult problem, as the songs people want to hear are regularly being released, are often associated with uncommon names, or have words in unusual orders, so normal LLM style tools just don't cut it.
This reminds me of how the thing iPhones had pre-Siri (so we're talking pre-2010), which was entirely offline, did a better job than even the most modern thing at "Play [one of the finite set of songs in my library]." I sometimes get absurd matches from bands I've never heard of, when the right answer is something right there in my library.
What the demo does not do is show streaming output of transcribed text as we are speaking and recording (before we hit stop). That is an essential feature IMO for most general purpose live STT apps.
My mind is boggled by how many implementations miss this.
Handy has Nemotron Streaming and it works fabulously, FWIW. I’ve vibed a kind-of-working Deepgram API server into it but haven’t gotten around to finishing it. It’s something that should exist IMO!
Tried it on a random TV episode and it seems to get stuck sometimes where it just outputs "Thank you." as a default - at one point emitting that for 60s of dialogue (and no, the episode does not have someone repeating "Thank you." for 60s.) Happens several times during the transcription.
It's funny how so many models tend to generate "Thank you. Don't forget to subscribe" or "Thanks for watching" if there is silence. Shows you what they've been trained on :-)
How does this compare with Parakeet? I've been using that locally in my projects on an M-series macbook and it's been working great. It's fast and accurate enough for my use cases (meeting transcription, audio transcription for demo videos, etc.)
This definitely seems lighter and faster. How does accuracy compare?
People keep praising Parakeet, but I've found it to be worse than Whisper Large. Yes, it is much, much faster and smaller, but accuracy matters a lot if you are to use dictation regularly and seriously.
I ended up having AI optimize Whisper Large and create a plugin for TypeWhisper, and that's what I use (feeding the results through local Qwen 3.8 running under MTPLX).
Parakeet is the gold standard. With models like moonshine and koroko (TTS model), it’s more about embedding the model in the application itself. If you’re using Parakeet, embedding it in the application is not feasible.
I use parakeet with superwhisper, and I’m making another app that has SST and TTS built in, and I want to use my downloaded parakeet model, but it seems there’s so many different implementations from ONNX to whisper, it’s not easy to use your downloaded models. So models like moonshine and this one allow you to just embed it into your application simply. It might not be as good as parakeet, but it gets you 80% of the way there.
Wow certainly in English this is incredibly accurate I tried to break it and it understood me perfectly!
I know it's slightly off topic but surely it must be easy by now to train a spell checker that doesn't annoy the crap out of everyone using it (looking at you here Apple)!
Hm. I saw language=detect and tried some Japanese - which (given the actual list of supported languages) unsurprisingly turned into some mangled Spanish.
Since it doesn't support Norwegian - I tried English - and it mis-transcribed "cleaning" for "training" - probably a failure due to context/training (Hello everyone, today we are going to do some cleaning).
Sooo I haven't really been super impressed with the needle models before, but this is very impressive. It transcribed multiple sentences I gave it with complex timing and words and in such a small footprint, I'm super impressed. Excited to see what types of things can be built with something like this, the performance seems very good.
This is actually a really great release. Congratulations team. I just tried few words. My Indian accent also was able to pick up.I'm gonna run it on my Linux Box.
love seeing more sub-20MB, CPU-first models. if anyone wants a CLI built on the same ethos (no GPU, no cloud), been using yapsnap streaming Zipformer ASR, plus diarization and timestamps all on CPU! It supports 10 languages. Unlimited transcription for free.
FUTO keyboard (open-source, free) runs entirely on-device and has extremely good STT accurary, especially with the 70M parameter model. I've used it for years now and love it.
Edit: As others have pointed out, this is not actually open source. It's source-available, which is quite a bit different because folks can't fork and distribute it as easily. The license also appears to be revocable and non-transferable, which makes it different from open source licenses.
Futo only produces source-available proprietary software. They most certainly are not Open Source, though they unfortunately lied about this a lot before they got called out enough times.
Madrid. But it will only work properly if I'm clearly dictating with a very regular rhythm (ViaVoice dictation, if anyone remembers...). If I use a more natural/conversational rhythm (no slang, no abbreviations...) it easily confuses words.
Initial tests make this feel just like iPhone's terrible text to speech. It is the one thing I utterly hate about iPhone. Ive tried apps that try to embed themselves into the iPhone keyboard and they always don't work out well. Hopefully this gets better and we can somehow get it into the iPhone more seamlessly.
Speech to text I assume? Maybe it has to do with your a accent or pronunciation? You could contribute a bit to Mozilla's Common voice, if that's the case. I assume it is part of every STT training corpus.
Yes sorry Speech to Text. I have a standard US East coast accent but sometimes I speak a little mumbly. When I made an effort to speak more slowly and with a cleared throat there was some improvement but still not writing all words.
I just setup Windows speech to text for him last week and it's great to see how he can write an entire page in 10 minutes, it would take him days using the keyboard.
But every single sound he makes with his mouth ends up on the page too.
Gemini team just released Gemini 3.5 Transcribe that’s supposed to be good at this; it’s available via api: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
You can set it "Push to talk" mode (like a walkie-talkie radio), and when you're done talking and release the button, it can paste the text into any text field.
You can even replicate ChatGPT voice conversation mode, by having Handy as your speech input, and then (I forgot the extension) enabling a speech-to-text model for OpenCode. Surprisingly relaxing flow for certain tasks, like tweaking a website's styles.
Because I have seemingly mixed opinions on it, on one hand, I did put the effort but on the other, the output is AI generated so I am unsure about sharing it with others (because they might think its AI generated)
Do you use it for very small edits (removing just the uhhm's?) or for slightly more edits.
The way that I use it sometimes is that while thinking, I will write something which can sometimes make me feel as if a better re-write can better explain my thoughts or rephrasing it as such. For example. I will think about X topic, connect it to Y, then try to add some more points about X again.
I found LLM's to do a really decent job at generating the final outputs as such, but as I said, I am left sometimes feeling a little confused as to sharing it or not because of it being AI generated and the end user not knowing if I put an actual effort into creation of it or not.
Should I try to share the actual transcript of it as well, I really wish if some good ethics and internet ettiquette could be established about it.
I was researching STT for people with speech disorders two years ago and essentially everything was boiling down to three problems at the end of the day - data scarcity, irregularity of way of speaking and thus constant ambiguity in translation, and individual differences in speech patterns among patients.
Handy has Nemotron Streaming and it works fabulously, FWIW. I’ve vibed a kind-of-working Deepgram API server into it but haven’t gotten around to finishing it. It’s something that should exist IMO!
This definitely seems lighter and faster. How does accuracy compare?
I ended up having AI optimize Whisper Large and create a plugin for TypeWhisper, and that's what I use (feeding the results through local Qwen 3.8 running under MTPLX).
I use parakeet with superwhisper, and I’m making another app that has SST and TTS built in, and I want to use my downloaded parakeet model, but it seems there’s so many different implementations from ONNX to whisper, it’s not easy to use your downloaded models. So models like moonshine and this one allow you to just embed it into your application simply. It might not be as good as parakeet, but it gets you 80% of the way there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo_Gomero
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langage_siffl%C3%A9_d%27Aas
[2]: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4lxhsi
I know it's slightly off topic but surely it must be easy by now to train a spell checker that doesn't annoy the crap out of everyone using it (looking at you here Apple)!
Since it doesn't support Norwegian - I tried English - and it mis-transcribed "cleaning" for "training" - probably a failure due to context/training (Hello everyone, today we are going to do some cleaning).
So, reasonable, but limited?
https://futo.tech/
Edit: As others have pointed out, this is not actually open source. It's source-available, which is quite a bit different because folks can't fork and distribute it as easily. The license also appears to be revocable and non-transferable, which makes it different from open source licenses.
https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/blob/master/LIC...
https://github.com/futo-org/voice-input/blob/master/LICENSE....
...Okay that was pretty good.