Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

TaylorAlexander

Hey this looks great! I like to record audio notes while driving in my car after work, to kind of decompress my thoughts from the day. But I never go back and listen as they can be long and meandering. Sometimes in the audio log I will sum up my thoughts, but this might be 20 minutes in and hard to find. I really wish I had transcriptions so I could easily scan the full contents. I have tried Mozilla Deepspeech (I don't want a cloud solution) and I was surprised to find that I could not get Deepspeech to reliably transcribe them. There is a bit of road noise, though I think for a human listener they are easy to understand. It looks like this one might actually do the trick!

EDIT: Tried it and it worked great! It is very easy to use. I just did the pip install line in the readme and was ready to go. You literally just run the one pip install line, and then you run the program in the format "whisper my_audio.wav" and it goes. Really nice job OpenAI!

Google's recorder app for android will let you record audio files and make some transcriptions, right on the device.

I just tested it and it was pretty mediocre at least with my accent. I can definitely benefit from a decent app for quick note recording with a button press->transcribe->upload to gdrive/good UI app for later grepping.

Was this with the default base model, or the medium or large model? This can be specified with the —model flag.

I meant the 'Google's recorder app' from the parent comment and not Whisper.

Ah right, sorry got my comment threads mixed up! Someone else was asking about performance with accented English speakers in another comment.

Is that application actually doing on-device transcription? Under "Data safety" on the Google Play page it says "This app may share these data types with third parties: Audio" which doesn't exactly instill confidence that my audio will 100% always stay on my device. It also says "Data is encrypted in transit" but if data stays on the device, why it has to be "encrypted in transit"? There should be no transit at all.

Yes, it works completely offline, including transcription and recognition of music. There's an optional cloud sync feature, which I assume is the reason for the notice on Google Play.

(Work for Google, don't speak for them.)

Thanks. Whose the third party that might get access to the audio? First party would be me, second party would be Google and then the third?

I think it's just Google for backup, or other apps via Android's standard sharing sheet. You can read the details here: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/9516618?hl=en

Google's recorder app is NOT available for most phones. Only Pixels and a couple of other selected handsets

I'll probably explore using this, but I've used an app called Just Press Record to do what you say. Runs on Apple Watch too, so you can tap a complication at any time in the day, speak, and you get a transcript on your phone, etc.

I do this too! I have been doing it for about a year now, and haven't ever run into someone else that does this kind of audio-journaling. Would you be up for comparing notes sometime about how it is working out for you? I am finding that it is extremely effective form of self-care, but with lots of personal caveats. I would be so interested to hear your experience.

Oh cool! Yeah I have stopped doing it lately as I was not really using them (I would like to use them for making rough notes for future youtube video scripts), though in general it does seem like good self care too even if I don't review them. That said I just tried the base model on one of my voice logs and it was pretty good! Trying the medium model now and it seems basically perfect. So I will have to start doing these logs more!

Anyway I am pretty terrible with email but short exchanges can work for me, or maybe we can connect over signal. Send me a message to my email in my profile and I would be happy to sync up!

I do this too, and I’ve built some software for it just for myself.

I’d love to chat and hear about how you use this! My email is in my profile, or I’m @tekacs on Twitter (and everywhere). :)

Count me in!! Working on tools actually to turn these transcriptions into something more social

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