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How good will this local model be compared to, say, your iphone builtin STT?

It’s way better. iPhone’s is awful. On macOS, interestingly, the built in dictation seems a bit better than on iOS, but still not as good as Whisper and Parakeet. Worth noting I have never used Whisper Small, only large and turbo. Another comment says Parakeet is the default now, though, despite what the site says.

Author here!

The default recommendation is Parakeet (mainly because it runs fast on a lot more hardware), but definitely think people should experiment with different models and see what is best for them. Personally I found Whisper Medium to be far better than Turbo and Large for my speech, and Parakeet is about on par with Medium, but each have their own quirks.

I'll update the site soon!

That's really interesting about medium being better than large. I never bothered trying the smaller models since the big ones were fast enough.

Benchmarks definitely say otherwise, but my anecdotal experience says medium is the best for this application with my voice and microphone

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