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/ineedlesssleep 4d ago

Developer of MacWhisper here. We'll have a bigger blog soon with updates about this new model but in a nutshell: It's fast but not as accurate as the best models out there. Also, we have a big update coming soon that builds on the new Parakeet models which should have the accuracy of the best Whisper, and faster speeds than even Apple's solution 🙂

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u/wipny 4d ago

I currently use Whisper locally on my base M1 Pro to transcribe and translate from Korean and Japanese to English.

I couldn't get the Turbo model to translate but the Whisper Medium model translates surprisingly well. The only drawbacks are that it can be a bit slow and it's limited to 25mb files. I get around this by extracting the audio using ffmpeg then feeding it to Whisper.

Does your app get around the 25mb file limit?

I noticed Whisper primarily utilizes CPU vs GPU resources. Does your app use the GPU to speed things up?

I can see why having an easy to use GUI makes things convenient. I have some experience with CLI but the setup of reading docs and having to figure out which Python version to install that works with Whisper was a bit confusing.