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.

Thank you for the support! I'm glad to hear that it's been helping you since the start of the year. Totally agree on the transformation prompts. It's challenging to get the transformation model to not occasionally get short-circuited, especially when I end up having it format a dictated prompt. Instead of formatting, it executes the prompt.

Sorry to hear about the auto-paste feature and taskbar icons. We'll try to restore these in the future, and you can track taskbar here:

https://github.com/epicenter-so/epicenter/issues/607

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.

We're actively tracking this issue here:

https://github.com/epicenter-so/epicenter/issues/440

Thank you again for bringing this to my attention! Need to step up my Windows development.

Thanks for flagging this, and sorry that this is happening! Does downloading the model manually work? I wonder if it's related to this:

https://github.com/epicenter-so/epicenter/issues/669

Thank you for the support! Sorry for the issues with FFmpeg. This is an active issue that we're tracking:

https://github.com/epicenter-so/epicenter/issues/674

We hope to fix notifications too thank you for the feedback and happy to hear you liked the system prompt!

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.

Awesome, thank you so much for bringing this to my attention! Always cool to see other open source projects that have better implementations :) much to learn!

I'm a huge fan of using Whisper hosted on Groq since the transcription is near instantaneous. ElevenLabs' Scribe model is also particularly great with accuracy, and I use it for high-quality transcriptions or manually upload files to their API to get diarization and timestamps (https://elevenlabs.io/app/speech-to-text). That being said, I'm not the biggest expert on models. In my day-to-day workflow, I usually swap between Whisper C++ for local transcription or Groq if I want the best balance of speed/performance, unless I'm working on something particularly sensitive.

Not that I know of. I think the two most prominent open-source models that we hear about are Whisper and Parakeet!

Some lovely folks have left some other open-source projects that implement Parakeet. I would recommend checking those out! I'll also work on my own implementation in the meantime :D

Thanks so much for the support! Really appreciate the feedback, and it’s great to hear the vision resonates. No worries on the STT/TTS experience; it’s just awesome to connect with someone who shares the values of open-source and owning our data :) I’m hoping my time in YC can be productive and, along the way, create more support for other OSS developers too. Keep in touch!

Agreed!

Totally agreed, huge fan of Hyprnote as well. We work on two slightly different problems, but a lot of our tech has overlap, and our missions especially overlap :)

Thank you so much for the support, really means a lot! Happy to hear that it has helped you with translation, and agreed, it's kinda crazy native dictation hasn't caught on yet. In the meantime, we have OSS to fill in the gaps.

Thank you so much for the support! It really means a lot to me. And I can't wait to hear about what you're building. Feel free to DM me and Discord when the time comes :)

The data is currently stored in IndexedDB, and you can currently only access it through the user interface (or digging into system files). However, I'm hoping in future updates, all of the transcriptions will instead be stored as markdown files in your local file system. More on that later!

Thank you so much for your support! It really means a lot :) Happy to hear that it's helped you, and keep in touch if you ever have any issues!

Diarization is on the roadmap; some providers support it but some don't and the adapter for that could be tricky. Whispering is not meant for meeting notes for now; for something like that or diarization I would recommend trying Hyprnote: https://hyprnote.com or interfacing with the Elevenlabs Scribe API https://elevenlabs.io/app/speech-to-text

Diarization is on the roadmap! Some providers support it, but some don't and the adapter for that could be tricky. Currently, for diarization I use the Elevenlabs Scribe API https://elevenlabs.io/app/speech-to-text, but there are surely other options

Need to run a diff against 7.2.2 tag against 7.3.0; I suspect the issue might be something related to an edit I made on `tauri.conf.json` or one of my Rust dependencies.

Yeah I agree, I neglected to update the docs and demo. This post was made anticipating the local transcription feature to drop earlier but it took some time due to some bugs. Before, the default option was using Groq for transcription, but that was admittedly before I figured out local transcription and wanted something to work in the meantime. Will be changing local as the default strategy in the documentation.

Great correction, wish I could edit the post! Updated the README to reflect this.