What...? It is terrible, even compared to Whisper Tiny, which was released years ago under an Apache 2.0 license so Apple could have adopted it instantly and integrated it into their devices. The bigger Whisper models are far better, and Parakeet TDT V2 (English) / V3 (Multilingual) are quite impressive and very fast.
I have no idea what would make someone say that iOS dictation is good at understanding speech... it is so bad.
For a company that talks so much about accessibility, it is baffling to me that Apple continues to ship such poor quality speech to text with their devices.
Parakeet TDT's architecture is actually a really cool way to boost both the speed and efficiency of real time STT compared to traditional approaches.
Maybe you just don’t know what you’re missing? Google’s default speech to text is still bad compared to Whisper and Parakeet, but even Google’s is markedly better than Apple’s.
I cannot think of a single speech to text system that I’ve run into in the past 5 years that is less accurate than the one Apple ships.
Sure, Apple’s speech to text is incredible compared to what was on the flip phone I had 20 years ago. Terrible is relative. Much better options exist today, and they’re under very permissive licenses. Apple’s refusal to offer a better, more accessible experience to their users is frustrating when they wouldn’t even have to pay a licensing fee to ship something better. Whisper was released under a permissive license nearly 4 years ago.
Apple also restricts third party keyboards to an absurdly tiny amount of memory, so it isn’t even possible to ship a third party keyboard that provides more accurate on-device speech to text without janky workarounds (requiring the user to open the keyboard's own app first each time).
Your comment says TTS, which is different from what I’m discussing, though, so there might be some confusion.
This is tangential but is _any_ accent objectively neutral?
It's there, doesn't feel native though. Good integration, not great though (Linux Mint/Cinnamon).
RCLI is Apple Silicon only today because MetalRT is built on Metal. For Linux, the closest thing to what you're describing would be building a virtual input device on top of Whisper or Parakeet (which RCLI supports as STT backends). Parakeet TDT 0.6B has ~1.9% WER, that's very close to production dictation quality.
The missing piece on Linux isn't the model, it's the integration: a daemon that captures mic audio, runs STT with hidden latency (streaming partial results), and injects text as keyboard input. sherpa-onnx (https://github.com/k2-fsa/sherpa-onnx) supports Linux and has streaming STT, it might be the best starting point for what your after.
We're focused on Apple Silicon for now but broader platform support is on the roadmap.
Umm, ah, wait no, uhh yes you are. Unless, hang on, you are possessed with greater umm speech capabilities than most, wait nevermind start over. Unless you never make a mistake while talking, you want AI to take out the "three, wait no four" and just leave the output with "four" from what you actually spoke. Depending on your use case.