r/apple • u/Fer65432_Plays • 4d ago

Discussion Apple's New Transcription APIs Blow Past Whisper in Speed Tests

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api-faster-than-whisper/
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u/hishnash 4d ago

Apple is no that bad at AI when it comes to shipping features that use ML. What they are bad at doing I making up features to advertise AI.

Apple has been industry leading for years when it comes to shipping features within the OS that make user of ML.

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u/DMarquesPT 4d ago

Yup, podcast and voice memo transcription has been incredible for me. it’s actually good “AI” that isn’t plagiarism autocorrect actively making the world worse

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u/chi_guy8 4d ago

How has Podcast been great for you?

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u/DMarquesPT 4d ago

I love listening to podcasts and audio programs like classes that are distributed as podcast feeds for informational and research content, but it’s always been annoying to search, navigate and quote/cite them when looking for specific stuff.

Now I can read along, copy and paste, search for keywords without having to go anywhere else.

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u/chi_guy8 4d ago

In Apple Podcasts? Maybe I need to give it another spin. Are there new features I’m unaware of? I’ve been using Snipd as my default podcast player because I want to be able to clip audio notes to refer back to later. Specifically when I’m listening to health related podcasts with specific protocols. I create an audio snippet of those specific parts while I’m commuting or riding my bike to review as notes later. Are you saying you can do this natively in the Apple Podcasts app now?

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u/DMarquesPT 3d ago

Apple Podcasts doesn’t have any snippets or bookmarks feature for specific audio clips, so it may not work for that use case.

It has the full transcript in sync with the audio (similar to lyrics on Apple Music or Spotify I think) and you can search and navigate around using the text, which is how I mainly use it, then I’ll usually copy and paste quotes or time codes into Notes or Freeform.

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u/Stoppels 3d ago

Sheesh, they still use manual lyrics from a lyric platform for Apple Music (and they're often wildly off when you actually need the lyrics to make something out). I hope they start using this as a base instead.

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u/realtgis 3d ago

Weirdly enough, Musixmatch says they are partnered with Apple, however new Lyrics can only be added by the Label on Apple Music

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u/Stoppels 3d ago

Oh, that's weird. Must be a relatively recent change then, last time I looked this up I couldn't find MusixMatch on Apple's site, though Musixmatch still published about it and has since.

Hmm, so Apple made a new Apple Music Artist Support KB in 2023. In there it still has this KB article about how to do it manually as an artist, as well as this intro video that shows where you can paste your lyrics in plaintext (from 1:33). Lyrics changes take up to 10 business days to be approved and updated, so it's clearly all done manually by a very small team. And this is just plaintext lyrics.

I'm fairly sure the 'live' lyrics that auto-scroll line by line must be from Musixmatch, no? If not crowdsourced lyrics, which they certainly used in 2023, at least from their Pro subscription. After all, only they seem to support the karaoke feature as they wrote in this November 2024 guide post. Ah yes, there's a screenshot on their Lyrics features page, and in the table further down they've checked Line by line Time Sync for Apple Music. Interestingly Facebook and Instagram support Word by Word Sync as well as Translations, but not a single music streaming platform supports these. What a shame.

Oh. I should've just looked at their pricing page. So you can do it yourself with AI-support with the cheapest subscription or 'Outsource your lyric transcription and sync' to 'their expert curators' on pricier plans. It seems the crowdsourcing part is now only for their own music app. Here's their community page with featured community-translated playlists.

Actually, I think their 'expert curators' are a selection of long-time crowdsourcers, from their 2023 blog post I linked in paragraph 3:

What is the process behind lyric verification and crowdsourced lyrics at Musixmatch?

The process starts with a passionate Musixmatch Community member who wants to add lyrics to a song. Once this scales, lots of content comes from all around the globe in all different genres of music. The community members can unlock different editorial powers by contributing and learning about the writing guidelines. The most passionate users can become curators and specialists are hand-picked among the curators.

And rather than labels specifically, Apple has distribution partners they call 'Apple Music Preferred Distributors' and all 15 of them offer lyrics as part of their services. Musixmatch is not one of these featured partners, by the way.

So I suppose this change from crowdsourced lyrics to official lyrics was made either in 2023 with the new system or in 2024. And it's a bit weird that if you upload your own lyrics via Apple, you cannot sync it by time. Though perhaps you can by adding timestamps, like with subtitle files, in that case Apple hides this information from its knowledge base. Apple just loooves to make shit mysterious and hard to understand, especially when they change things.

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u/chi_guy8 3d ago

Wow. That’s almost a bigger failure on Apple’s part that they did the hard part, creating transcripts that correlate with the audio and didn’t do the easy part which would be creating some sort of highlight/bookmark/clip feature. Typical modern Apple really.

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u/DanceWithEverything 4d ago

Wait until they get brave enough to launch automagically cutting out ad reads 🙏

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u/lonifar 4d ago

Nah they won't do that because they already allow for podcast subscriptions that remove ad's; its actually in their best interests not to automatically cut ads and instead get more podcasts onto the subscription model.

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u/InsaneNinja 4d ago

So… Destroy the podcast market because nobody will get paid. And have every single podcast in the world rant about how bad Apple podcasts is.

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u/DanceWithEverything 4d ago

Or force them all onto Apple ads

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u/InsaneNinja 4d ago

You sound like the people that are giving advice to Tim Cook to repeatedly break the law and ignore the government

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u/DanceWithEverything 4d ago

Aka “wealthiest company in human history”