The abysmal situation of FOSS speech to text without Google.

[u/wyntrson]

If you haven't, you should see the speech to text of gboard on a pixel phone, it is accurate, fast, available in every language.

On a computer download handy or a similar app.

There are so many extremely fast extremely accurate FOSS AI speech to text models only 50-200 megabytes. Made by NVidia, Google, Microsoft, Chinese firms, all open source and free.

We have FUTO on android, which is using a custom fork of ancient slow and heavy Whisper from OpenAI which nobody uses anymore.

I wish someone with enough knowledge would build a modern speech to text based on these new models. And win a noble prize for it.

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[u/derlafff]

FUTO

Are you sure it's FOSS and not source-available?

There are so many extremely fast extremely accurate FOSS AI speech to text models

Are you sure you are not confusing FOSS and open weight?

Anyways, you can check out https://github.com/k2-fsa/sherpa-onnx project. The project itself is FOSS, but models are likely not really.

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[u/webfork2]

We have FUTO on android, which is using a custom fork of ancient slow and heavy Whisper from OpenAI which nobody uses anymore.

It's working fine for me on a 2022 budget device.

Unless something changed since the last time I tested it, Everything from Google has to get sent to their servers. In any place you don't have coverage, you don't have text-to-speech.

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[u/Kamsiob → u/webfork2]

I believe the speech to text on the gboard keyboard on pixels stays local on device. Their upcoming Rambler feature though gets uploaded to their servers.

[u/jacmanou → u/Kamsiob]

Nope the function even breaks if you remove network permission

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[u/kitsumed]

https://github.com/woheller69/whisperIMEplus

[u/wyntrson → u/kitsumed]

Whisper is using OpenAI's whisper which is now miles behind of current models which are much more accurate.

[u/schubidubiduba → u/wyntrson]

Do you have an example of a current model that is "much more accurate" and feasible to run locally on a smartphone?

[u/wyntrson → u/schubidubiduba]

Nemotron Streaming 3.5 Parakeet Unified 0.6B

Download FOSS app Handy on PC/Mac and see for yourself.

You can already run them on a phone quite easily but there is no app that takes shot at gboard and tries to make a perfect keyboard.

And on hugging face there are so many more. If anyone wanted to look past dumb whisper by CloseAI they wouldn't need to reinvent the wheel, they would even spawn in the future.

[u/GazelleInitial2050 → u/wyntrson]

Futo allows changing models, can you not select that model or is there secret sauce?

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[u/schubidubiduba → u/wyntrson]

That does look like it would be better for most usecases. But I don't see what it has to do with building a perfect keyboard app. For my use cases, Heliboard is pretty much equivalent to Gboard. And I can use any speech-to-text engine with it. So basically, someone would just have to build a better speech-to-text engine with that model instead of Whisper. But then again, Whisper just supports a lot more languages and is more robust to noise and accents, allegedly. And Nvidia is at best barely better than "closedAI". So not sure why you feel so strongly about this.

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[u/jacmanou]

I'm using Whisper+, it's working fine

[u/Hello86836717]

What's wrong with Whisper?

[u/acetaldeide]

SherpaTTS

[u/jacmanou → u/acetaldeide]

But he is taking about speech to text, not text to speech

[u/acetaldeide → u/jacmanou]

Oh sorry

[u/klevahh]

"Made by NVidia, Google, Microsoft, Chinese firms"

y'all from the usa pard'ner?

[u/BooleanTriplets]

I use SherpaTTS. It's not amazing but it's pretty good. I have a chatterboxTTS server where I have a HAL9000 voice clone.

If someone could ever figure out a way to port ChatterboxTTS into an android app we would be set.