EDIT: Seems like caster itself has instructions for an open source recognition engine to pair with it. Not sure how accurate it'll be but I'm going to give it a shot!
I hate the idea of relying on closed source software to be able to continue in my profession. If this works I'm definitely going to be donating to the FOSS options
I'd like to try to record my usage of Dragon that I could fine-tune my own model, but it's harder to get around to hobby coding projects like that now that coding is more of a pain in the ass.
The unfortunate reality in my case is that using Dragon is the least frustrating way to keep working. I don't think closed paid ASR models will stop being noticeably better better than three open ones until the state-of-the-art error rate is basically zero.
I do like that caster is open source where talon isn't, but preferences like that are pretty low priority when say your career is on the line.
For sure if its on the line right now you use what is available and works best right now, but the reality of niche software is the companies/people backing it tend to close down or move on as they realize the market is too small to sustain them. Or Microsoft updates its OS in a way that forces them to expend considerable time making it functional again and they just don't have the bandwidth for it so you're stuck for some amount of time or indefinitely.
If you have no other choice, its definitely better than nothing and you want to use what enables you to do your job the best. But in terms of where I'd be willing to throw my financial support? It'd need to be something for the better of the coding community as whole. For me, this means an open source tool or set of tools, not a proprietary system.
Talon ships with a libw2l.so/dylib on Linux/Mac built from my open source repos.
For my own use I’ve already built Pytorch and CoreML frontends, with a shared model format (can convert models to/from wav2letter format and my custom format), and I have the ability to create new models in these frameworks from wav2letter architecture files.
I still run my training in the wav2letter framework, but for compatible training in Pytorch I would mostly just need criterion implementations. I assume warpCTC is fine for the CTC models. There’s also a third party Pytorch ASG criterion package but I haven’t tried it yet.
I didn't know that there was a pytorch implementation of the w2l architectures..