braden-w

I totally agree with this hot take. Whispering is not there yet, but I eventually want it to store as many of the transcripts as plain text markdown, alongside your audio files, in a folder.

The idea is that as we add more local-first apps into the ecosystem (writing, etc.), they're share this context. Transcription would benefit immensely if you also had a writing app that you could trust to store your data. To execute that vision, we needed a transcription app where we have control over how data is stored, and the best solution was to build our own.

Thanks for sharing a great alternative! It seems that that setup can go a long way for Linux users.

Thanks for shouting out some other great alternatives! The UI looks really clean.

Right now, the pricing is entirely free, and we are trying to expand our local model support to make it truly free. Subscriptions are up to the user right now.

Thanks for giving us a shot, and no pressure on using it! At the end of the day, I just want to build something that is open source and trustworthy, and hopefully will fit into the Epicenter ecosystem, the data layer that I talked about earlier in my post.

Sorry for the delayed response, thank you for sharing these articles! I agree. I hope that we get a lot better open-source STT options in the future.

I really want to run it locally on a phone, but as a developer it's scary to think about making a native mobile app and having to work with the iOS toolchain I don't have bandwidth at the moment, but if anyone knows of any OSS mobile alternatives, feel free to drop them!

Thank you for the support, and agreed on OS-level integration. At least for me, I have trouble trusting any app unless they are open source and have a transparent codebase for audit :)

Awesome, thank you so much for bringing this to my attention and including it in the thread! Always cool to see other open source projects :)

We like Whisper because it's open-source :) but we also support OpenAI 4o-transcribe/ElevenLabs/Deepgram APIs that all use non-Whisper models (presumedly) under the hood. Speaches also supports other models that are not Whisper. Hopefully adding Parakeet support later too!

Awesome, thank you so much for bringing this to my attention! Cool to see another open source project that has different implementations :) much to learn with their Parakeet implementation!

^Yep, unfortunately, the best option right now seems to pipe the output into another LLM to do some cleanup, which we try to help you do in Whispering. Recent transcription models don't have very good built-in inference/cleanup, with Whisper having the very weak "prompt" parameter. It seems like this is probably by design to keep these models lean/specialized/performant in their task.