Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcription tool?

Posted by uohzxela on Sunday November 10, 2024 @06:24PM
from the ask-hn dept.

As a hearing impaired software engineer, I have built my own local-first solution to transcribe entirely locally in real time word by word. It's my daily driver for transcribing meetings, interviews, etc. Because of its local-first capability, I do not have to worry about privacy concerns when transcribing meetings at work as all data stays on my machine. It's about as fast as Otter.ai although there's definitely room for improvements in terms of UX and speed. Caveat is that it only works on MacBooks with Apple silicon, fronted by a very simple TUI.

I am thinking of putting it up as an open source project on GitHub to garner interest. If interest is high, commercializing it as a product would be a next step. Before I go too deep in that direction, I'm curious about the market demand. How does the HN community think about the demand for a local-first live transcription tool?

( 16 comments | 3 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by sfmz on Sunday November 10, 2024 @06:40PM (#42103410)

Is it stronger/better than Real-time Whisper WebGPU ?

https://huggingface.co/spaces/Xenova/realtime-whisper-webgpu

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by uohzxela on Sunday November 10, 2024 @07:01PM (#42103493)

I've tried this demo before. My solution is better in terms of latency and accuracy. You can place Otter.ai and Real-time Whisper WebGPU side by side and see the difference. That's the difference I observed with my solution as well.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by talldayo on Sunday November 10, 2024 @06:41PM (#42103414)

> If interest is high, commercializing it as a product would be a next step

Why? OpenAI's Whisper is a free local model with native GUIs on most operating systems. I wrote one myself in a weekend, it's one of hundreds of similar GUIs that exist.

What functionality would you be offering that people can't otherwise get for free? This is a pretty competitive space, trying to sell a TUI is going to leave you gravely disappointed by the sales (unless it's extremely impressive).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by uohzxela on Sunday November 10, 2024 @06:57PM (#42103477)

Most of the free Whisper GUI offerings do not provide real-time transcription; even if they do, it's not performant enough for my needs.

TUI is just a starting point. Differentiators would be a better GUI, and better real-time performance.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by yen223 on Sunday November 10, 2024 @08:56PM (#42104001)

The concern I have for commercialising this product is that there's a very high chance Apple will roll this out as a feature in macOS 17 or 18. It seems like a natural evolution of Apple Intelligence.

Edit: Just noticed that Apple Notes in Sequoia already has "Live audio transcription"

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by uohzxela on Monday November 11, 2024 @06:21AM (#42106319)

It’s a good point. I briefly looked at their GUI and it’s very tied to the Apple Notes surface. It’s a good way to provide real time transcription to the masses, but their UX and speed leaves a lot to be desired.

Why do we have so many custom notes app when we can just use Apple Notes?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by compressedgas on Sunday November 10, 2024 @09:35PM (#42104183)

This reminded me of https://github.com/usefulsensors/moonshine

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by uohzxela on Monday November 11, 2024 @06:29AM (#42106373)

Yeah I checked that out. My current Whisper model is small.en which has a lower WER and is fast enough for real time transcription.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by satvikpendem on Sunday November 10, 2024 @11:18PM (#42104566)

What model are you using? Whisper Turbo can do real time transcription and there are implementations that are pretty fast.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by uohzxela on Monday November 11, 2024 @06:24AM (#42106347)

I’m using Whisper medium.en. I’ll check out Turbo, thanks! Looks like it’s released last month. My solution is pretty model agnostic. If Turbo is indeed as fast as they advertised with lower WER than small.en, then it will supercharge my solution as well (it’s already pretty fast and accurate).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by masterj on Sunday November 10, 2024 @11:52PM (#42104661)

Yes, my partner is hearing-impaired and I’ve been looking for a tool like this for them

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by uohzxela on Monday November 11, 2024 @06:27AM (#42106361)

Good to know. Do the existing real time transcription apps work? If not why?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by oulipo on Monday November 11, 2024 @02:42AM (#42105219)

There's the MacWhisper app which seems to be used a lot, so perhaps you could integrate, or do something similar? I guess if you open-source it the MacWhisper dev can also integrate it

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by mkbkn on Wednesday November 13, 2024 @09:57AM (#42126584)

I would love a local transcription app that works on Android and Linux.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by sz429961 on Sunday November 17, 2024 @05:04PM (#42167747)

I built one and use it daily myself, it uses Whisper for local transcription and Llama 3.2 for local AI conversation, it has good UX as well, support live record or importing any audio/video files.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notes-ai/id6477414161

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Is there demand for a local-first live transcript... by zorolab on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @04:16AM (#42181414)

As I am not native English speaker, this kind of live transcription tool can be much helpful for the daily communcation. Just curious, will it be something like Live Transcribe on iOS? https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-transcribe/id1471473738

[ Parent | on HN ]