Hi all. I am Shahir. This was my experiment. First of all - Thanks to whoever posted this on HN. It came as a surprise.
Just to clarify - This started as just an experiment to see if we can use the fact that text and audio share a vector space in Embedding Gemma 2 to convert audio to text. Had to hack around a few things, but, it worked. Speed was just a side benefit. Was not aiming for it.
The accuracy is good, but not in the range of cloud models, but decent enough for everyday use, and this is just a couple of days work. The WER can improve a lot with more training on varied data. Will try that next.
I will opensource the whole thing soon. Might need a few days though. Also, releasing the TTS version for this soon.
Happy to answer any questions you have.
Cool experiment. It will be amazing if this can match the WER of the best open weight models at better speed.
People aren't paying enough attention to how great EmbeddingGemma 2 and Gemma 4 are.
can this tool transcribe latin language texts? McWhisper allegedly does it but it outputs gibberish
Thanks for putting this out there!
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It was your post yesterday that made me aware of granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc (which I guess you used as a comparator because it's already very fast).
Thank you!
(Until now I've been using mlx-community/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3)