Big fan of Salvatore's voxtral.c and flux2.c projects - hope they continue to get optimized as it'd be great to have lean options without external deps. Unfortunately it's currently too slow for real-world use (AMD 7800X3D/Blas) when adding Voice Input support to llms-py [1].
In the end Omarchy's new support for voxtype.io provided the nicest UX, followed by Whisper.cpp, and despite being slower, OpenAI's Whisper is still a solid local transcription option.
Also very impressed with both the performance and price of Mistral's new Voxtral Transcription API [2] - really fast/instant and really cheap ($0.003/min), IMO best option in CPU/disk-constrained environments.
In the end Omarchy's new support for voxtype.io provided the nicest UX, followed by Whisper.cpp, and despite being slower, OpenAI's Whisper is still a solid local transcription option.
Also very impressed with both the performance and price of Mistral's new Voxtral Transcription API [2] - really fast/instant and really cheap ($0.003/min), IMO best option in CPU/disk-constrained environments.
[1] https://llmspy.org/docs/features/voice-input
[2] https://docs.mistral.ai/models/voxtral-mini-transcribe-26-02