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- Hacker News
- Still more expensive and worse performing than ElevenLabs Scribe, unfortunately. Not sure who's the target audience for this.by dbbk
- I did the math based on our data from customers in https://whispermemos.com/ and it seems to be $0.12 per hour of input audio, with our average tokens/sec.
Scribe is $0.22.
If the accuracy is close to Scribe, I think it's a good deal.
by Void_ - I've been using Wispr Flow on my pixel 9 and I like it. It does the things that Rambler says it's supposed to do but it's available on my Pixel 9 unlike rambler that's currently only available for pixel 11.by blissofbeing
- That's really impressive! It says it's available in GBoard on Android but I don't see it yet. I assume like most Google features it will be a rolling release over the course of several months, can't wait to try it some day.by gumby271
- It is confusing. As far as I can tell "rambler for Android" is a named subfeature of gboard and only on Pixel 10+ and newer Samsung phones. From a user standpoint it "just" seems like the transcription has gotten better - not an app you use or a feature that you enable.by bahmboo
- I'd love to know how this handles proper subtitle formatting. I'm in the process of learning many languages, and being able to cross check my own understanding with film and video would be fantastic.by Freedom2
- Hi, I am making an app for language learning which generates subtitles to help with this exact problem. Its called SubSmith and free to try, would love some feedback on it!by IbrahimF96
- Curious if this suffers from the same hallucination problems as Chirp or not. For example, if you pass chirp some audio with noise or even no audio, it will barf text at you like "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." until a request timeout fires after like 10 minutes. It's... really bad. For this reason, we've moved back to Whisper for timestamp accuracy and then Gemini Flash for transcription correction.by film42
- I’ve noticed the some of YouTube’s auto-generated captions will sometimes hallucinate “Heat” during long music segments; probably an older model though.by tech234a
- Yes, that's sort of our strategy as well: for us accuracy (and following a style guide, and extracting on-screen text from video) is important. So we do a first pass with whisper to get the word timestamps, and the pass the same audio (chunked in case of longer ones) to Gemini (pro, not this model), to transcribe without timestamps. After that you can transfer the timestamps from whisper to the timestamp-less Gemini text, by looking for runs of identical words in both and fudging timestamps for the other words I'm between a bit. Works quite well, and I'll be tesing this model to see if it can replace Whisper.by Doohickey-d
- I am using it all day as a main dictation model, and I can say it's the best model in terms of accuracy, latency, and formatting I have ever used.by k9294
- I've seen Whisper do this exact thing as well. And also repeating a few words over and over near the end, words that were said but not completely at the end. It seems to overwrite the last few sentences with that so actual content is lost. It's really annoying especially because Whisper is really quite good otherwise. Sometimes a friend sends me audio messages from a noisy car and I can't make it all out but whisper gets it mostly right.by wolvoleo
- I eval'd this pretty heavily with no audio or just noise, as for us hallucinating a response is very bad. It works great in this scenario. There are some bugs, e.g. randomly exactly 20 seconds of silence will lead to a 403, but I'm sure these aspects will be improved over time. I didn't get any hallucinations though.by sync
- Just added this to my benchmark site: https://multilingualsttbench.com/
It doesn't reach the frontier in either latency or accuracy for ai multilingual conversations.
by mariano54 - missing aqua voice's avalon 1.5 model there.by alxndr13
- Thanks for this, really helpful.
I would also like to see benchmark for translation. I'm looking for live translated subtitles so my Japanese wife can enjoy any show with out waiting months for official VOD streams to release them.
by adamgoodapp - I'm confused, doesn't your leaderboard clearly show it is the most accurate model? It's number one in the leaderboard. Am I missing something?by Kokouane
- I personally tested all the STT models for my real-time translator (https://fliptalk.ai). From language detection and accuracy in a noisy environment to the most important point: latency.
At the moment, Soniox STT v5 is definitely the best, and I'm impressed by its performance. It's good that Google released Gemini-3.5-Transcribe, and it beats every other model on accuracy, but it definitely needs a bit more work on latency, which is the most important factor for STT apps.
by lnalx - Thank you for this!
I was using Cartesia, while their TTS is amazing their STT pricing has kind of irked me.
Interested in know how good soniox latency and EUD is on STT compared to Cartesia. Cartesia's is really in real world conversations
- Realtime + Voice AI usecases is where latency is most important. I use Handy on my desktop and i can tolerate a latency of a few seconds every now and then. Your P99 should on TTFB should be really low to compete for voice ai realtimeby ghm2199
- Depends on your use case. If you're transcribing meeting notes, latency is a non-issue.
Perhaps latency is more important than accuracy for a real time translation app (I actually disagree with this - imagine e.g. the hilarity when requesting "a new display" being translated as "a nudist play"), but certainly not for all applications. My pet app transcribes personal voice notes to self, it could run all night.> latency, which is the most important factor for STT apps.by dotancohen- Soniox website has a live comparison demo: https://soniox.com/compare-stt
For me, Gemini-3.5-Transcribe actually has slightly lower latency. Kudos to Soniox for both paying their competitor and letting them win. But yes, Soniox is much cheaper.
- I am not sure if "Word Error Rate" captures what has always been wrong with transcription. My biggest complaint is that it inserts sentence breaks in random places, then fails to evaluate the result, even though it is obviously wrong. Then I have to go fix it which can be harder than having just typed it myself, due to the difficulty of positioning the Android cursor, the fact that it automatically capitalizes if you delete a capital letter, etc. And much of the time I fail to notice the errors until later.by jeffbee
- have another model do a pass to clean it up, saw a demo of local STT where someone did this, can fix a lot of things, especially with gotchas for the STT model in a clean-transcript.mdby verdverm
- I'd certainly use Gemini API a lot more if I could figure out how to give them money and they give me tokens. The whole tier nonsense is just insane hoop jumping compared to their competition.by zhivota
- Its easy to pre-pay tho?
- I use OpenRouter. Interacting with the Google Cloud Console is pure pain.by Frannky
- "Function calling: The model can delegate complex tasks (such as image generation and file analysis) to other Gemini models via function calls. Currently available in the Gemini macOS app."
This confused the heck out of me because it makes it sound like the STT model can make function calls in order to execute arbitrary tasks, which wouldn't make any sense. The developer docs (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models/gemini-3.5-tran...) confirm that the Gemini 3.5 Transcribe model cannot in fact make function calls. I guess the blog post is just using very confusing wording to describe how their consumer assistant/chatbot app can both take audio input via Gemini 3.5 Transcribe and then call other things as needed. Or maybe that bullet point was meant to be for a different model announcement and somebody made an editing error.
- I assume they're talking about Gemini Live?by dbbk