Posted by get-inscribe 12 hours ago
Cloud models are usually protected by trade secret laws, leaking them would get you in trouble. However if the model is made available publicly, as long as you don't break the law to get them, anything after that would be fair game unless Apple can prove that humans have significant authorship over the weights, which hasn't been tested and is a significant burden to prove/disprove.
The Jedi Hand Wave-y nature of the way people talk about AI these days is going to make reigning in the AI superpowers nearly impossible. Because there are people out here who believe models of this quality are easily replicated or reverse engineered. Neither is really doable on any reasonable timeline by people who are not AI experts. Real AI experts. Not TF/PyTorch monkeys or Agent Slop Slingers.
And those people are already highly incentivized to not make anything performing better than SOTA models open source.
Im looking for the same experience I have when talking to chatGPT. As for past two years or more talking to GPT within it's app and on my iPhone Pro Max 15 it runs smooth as butter :-). This is the experience I was and still am hoping with Apple, but Im thinking all the extra layers of privacy and security might be slowing them down?
Overall, Apple who is suing Open AI should just buy them and let me have the best conversational AI out there baked into my old ass iPhone. Because as so far the new Siri on my old phone (tho again GPT works great talking to it and for years) doesnt come close. It's the same old "Could you try that again," Siri. BOO!!!
1. In Shortcuts app, make shortcut named "AI Voice Mode" (or whatever you want, YMMV)
2. Set it to run the ChatGPT action "Voice Mode" (requires at least the minimum paid tier, I think)
3. To trigger, say "Hey Siri, AI Voice Mode" (or whatever you called the shortcut)
Thanks for the tip and if Im not mistaken it's similar to asking Siri to ask chatGPT to ask XYZ?
Effectively, it sort of does that, but really it just listens to the wakeword and opens/switches to the requested app & modality.
FWIW, I get a very different functional result using the Shortcut method vs. asking Siri to delegate natively. To compare, I asked Siri (non-beta here) now to "ask ChatGPT <x>" and I got a top-card with some fairly low quality SEO-ranked weblinks.
New Siri is impressive in that it answers satisfactorily now 80% of the time vs 10% with old Siri.
But it’s slow as shit. GPT, Claude, and Gemini can answer me in 5-10 seconds. Google AI Mode can answer in 2 seconds.
New Siri usually takes 25 seconds to respond to me. This morning it timed out (with strong network connection) when asked a simple multiplication question.
Apple would never do that, if anything they did not offer their Siri with the most advanced AI on iPhone 16 Pro Max, which is one year-old only.
Apple published no accuracy numbers for SpeechAnalyzer (or for SFSpeechRecognizer, ever, as far as I can tell), so the migration question has been guesswork. Short version: the new API cuts WER 3.5-4x vs the old one (2.12% vs 9.02% on test-clean), and it also beat Whisper Small on both splits at about 3x the speed. The old API came in last on clean speech, behind even Whisper Tiny.
On "why should I trust a vendor benchmark": the Whisper column reproduces OpenAI's published LibriSpeech WERs within +0.11 to +0.42 on all six measurements (same corpus, same normalizer, same scorer for every engine), and the raw per-utterance transcripts are downloadable from the article if anyone wants to rescore with their own normalizer.
Limitations worth stating up front: English only, read speech rather than meeting audio, one machine. Precise per-engine timing isn't in the article yet because the accuracy runs shared the machine with a dev workload; WER is load-independent, timing isn't.
Two things that might interest people migrating: SFSpeechRecognizer sends audio to Apple's servers unless you set requiresOnDeviceRecognition, and with SpeechAnalyzer, finishing your input stream is not enough to end a session. If you never call finalizeAndFinishThroughEndOfInput(), the results sequence never terminates and your await hangs forever. I found that one because it was shipping in my own app.
Happy to answer questions about the harness or the normalizer.
On the more cutting edge front, Granite Speech 4.1 has proven to be a reliable workhorse for me, but it is larger than Parakeet. Cohere Transcribe is interesting, but how strong it is seems to vary more from task to task.
Parakeet Unified 0.6B came out a few months ago, combining both online streaming and offline transcription into one model, and that is one that I need to test more, but it seems promising.
As others have mentioned macOS 27/iOS 27 is supposed to have a new model, particularly on devices with 12GB of RAM or more. I have not actually seen the option to enable that new model yet, though, despite being on the beta on a device that meets the requirements. Maybe a benchmark would reveal that it is already active?
Also, just out of curiosity, seems like everyone and their mother is making Whisper wrappers, how is your app different?
MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize
Edit: Getting downvoted by Apple fanboys for telling the truth is a badge of honor.
> What this means if you just want good transcription
> If you are on a current iPhone or Mac, the best on-device transcription engine for English is already in the operating system, and the private option is no longer the compromise option
If trust Apple, then no need for privacy from Apple
How can you be sure this isn't leaking data or metadata to Apple? Can Apple really be trusted?
> If you are on a current iPhone or Mac
Presumably if you don't trust apple you wouldn't purchase their products and even if you were for example forced to use it via work or something you wouldn't use this feature ... so it doesn't really change the calculus as presented by this article - IF you ALREADY HAVE a MODERN Mac (and trust apple) this is your best option
https://alternativeto.net/software/little-snitch/
https://www.g2.com/products/little-snitch/competitors/altern...
There are many alternatives for trying to find out what’s going on. If you don’t want to bother, and most people don’t, well, what else is there to say?
It is generally a good idea to know what software is phoning home, if you can pinpoint it.
If you have any software recommendations, I’d be happy to know.
The appeal is that users only have to download it once across all apps that use it. Instead of convincing a user to give a couple gigs for just your one app