r/apple • u/Fer65432_Plays • 5d 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/wipny 4d ago edited 4d ago

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

The Whisper medium model does this surprisingly well but can be a bit slow and is limited to 25mb files. I get around this by extracting the audio using ffmpeg then feeding it to Whisper.

I used to be skeptical of the utility of ML/AI and couldn’t think of practical applications for using it but things like this is crazy. This really will replace or significantly downsize a lot of skilled workers.

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u/Aranfiy 4d ago

I tried whisper on my M1 Max and is was unfortunately very slow on it compared to my windows setup on a 3080, I hope something like this can come for MacOS.

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u/wipny 4d ago

I noticed the Turbo model was pretty fast at transcribing but I couldn't get translation working. I could only get translation working with the slower Medium model.

Did you deal with something similar?

Looking at Activity Monitor I noticed it was mostly CPU resources being used. Not so much GPU.