Canto: A speech model built for the real world
35 points by sleepypandas 10 hours ago | 14 comments
  • hs86 8 hours ago |
    They also have a video announcement: https://x.com/WisprFlow/status/2100640514186072347
  • ks2048 8 hours ago |
    They need to show some examples. You beat all the top models on your private data set? Show at least a couple examples - audio and transcripts - from examples that your model got right and others got wrong.
    • ymaws 7 hours ago |
      after reading the article I still have no idea how their thing performs, or if I should care how it performs since a majority of voice benchmarks still don't map to human evals
  • IOT_Apprentice 8 hours ago |
    What languages are supported?
  • simonjgreen 8 hours ago |
    Congrats Wisprflow, love to see this. Especially learning the users nuances and corrections, i think that may be novel in the dictation app space. Things like Handy have the ability to specify common typos but some method of automatic learning is new.

    This is a pretty hot space right now. For me, it's all incredible for two things:

    - I get my unabridged thoughts down on the page substantially quicker and cleaner using dictation. I believe dictation is the perfect first draft tool, and an amazing way to interact with AI too as you can dump tonnes of personal opinion in to every prompt without the overhead of keyboard interface.

    - Accessibility! I know a couple of folks whos ability to use a computer has been tremendously elevated by the recent improvements in dictation. Due to mobility issues, they feel largely locked out of interacting online and tools like Handy and Wisprflow have been a game changer for them.

    Very excited about all this, keep it coming!

    • qingcharles 6 hours ago |
      Is Handy still the best option for local?

      Wispr lagged my PC to hell; plus, the cost. The quality was excellent, though.

      • dinkleberg 5 hours ago |
        There are lots of good option (and they all use the same set of models, so really take your pick), but Handy works very well.
  • qprofyeh 7 hours ago |
    Wonder if they are aware of Cantonese, the language that is often abbreviated as Canto.
    • monknomo 7 hours ago |
      Probably this is after the italian word for singing
      • hbn 7 hours ago |
        Or Spanish, specifically it's the first person conjugation, meaning "I sing" or "I'm singing"
        • rahimnathwani 4 hours ago |
          Same in Latin.

          And in Italian and Portuguese, but I think they might use pronouns, too.

  • nr378 6 hours ago |
    Is it actually better than Microsoft's MAI-Transcribe-2? That generally seems like the best model right now and it's not included in their benchmarks.

    I switched from Superwhisper->WisprFlow->Spokenly->Fieldwork and found WisprFlow the least accurate of the 4.

  • Redster 5 hours ago |
    Congrats on the launch! I'm glad more progress is being made in this area.

    Because of the hallucinations inherent in transformer models, I went looking for a transducer-based model with a low WER. I have been super pleased with parakeet-unified-en-0.6b. It's WER isn't as low as Canto, but it's about as low as you can get (~5-6.5%) with a non-transformer-based model as far as I'm aware.

    I've been very pleased with its output.

    I wasn't looking for this, but it's also lightweight enough to run on my little potato PC, which has an i5 8th gen processor, and still transcribe 9-10x faster than realtime.

    I vibe-coded a little wrapper for it and use it on folders of audio or podcast rss feeds or even YT playlists and channels and it's been one of my new favorite tools.

  • vivzkestrel an hour ago |
    - since we are on the topic i ll ask again here

    - i want to record my voice for gaming sessions but i have a horrible voice

    - i want to speak and convert my voice in real time to one of the good quality AI voices out there

    - bonus points if it can be an OBS plugin. even if such a plugin doesnt exist I am happy to code one

    - anyone got any recommendations for a library that solves this issue? most of the whisper and other stuff out there is non real time and I am looking for something open source