Transcribing audio to text has traditionally been a tedious task, often requiring careful listening and fast typing skills. However, in recent years, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized this process. A great example of such innovation is the introduction of Aiko, a tool designed to make audio transcription a breeze for macOS and iOS users.
Aiko stands out with its ability to provide high-quality transcriptions directly on your device. The app utilizes the impressive Whisper model from OpenAI, ensuring that everything from meetings and lectures to personal voice notes can be transcribed with ease. What’s even more appealing is that Aiko does all of this while running locally on your device, offering an additional layer of privacy for those sensitive recordings.
For an efficient and streamlined experience, Aiko includes support for Shortcuts on iOS. This feature allows users to quickly record, transcribe, and save transcriptions with minimal effort.
Looking into the future, Aiko promises exciting new features like:
· Batch conversation capabilities
· The ability to export transcriptions to a karaoke file format
· Support for audio in an extensive range of 100 languages
Privacy is a cornerstone of Aiko's design. Every transcription is processed on your device without the need to send data to external servers. This approach is ideal for users concerned with confidentiality.
Aiko’s efficiency is powered by the large v2 Whisper model on macOS, and depending on the memory available, either the medium or small models on iOS devices.
Aiko's transcription divides the text by sentences. If you prefer your text in paragraphs, you can easily format it with the help of either GPT-4 or GPT-3.5 prompts. Moreover, to address the occasional issue of missing punctuation, it provides a simple solution to polish your transcription further.
Users of Aiko have raised questions and here are some answers to those:
· The Mac app doesn't use the v3 model because tests showed the v2 version actually performs better in many instances.
· Editing isn't supported within the app, but text can be exported and edited using any text editor of choice.
· Compared to Apple's built-in transcription services, Aiko offers superb accuracy, many languages support, as well as the capacity to transcribe from both audio and video files.
· Aiko is devised to give you text that's as close to your original audio as possible. Any errors in the transcription are not within the developer’s control but they welcome feedback.
· Despite its overall proficiency, Aiko may sometimes repeat phrases or miss punctuations due to limitations in the current AI model.
· In rare cases, the transcription may include an extra sentence not found in the audio. These are unintentional quirks from the AI’s training and are not messages with hidden meanings.
Aiko presents a modern, efficient, and private method of transcribing audio files that is poised to leave traditional transcription methods in the past. While it does have a couple of AI model-related flaws, the pros of convenience, security, and language support make it an attractive option for anyone in need of converting speech to text.
For more information or to address any concerns, users are encouraged to reach out for support via dedicated channels mentioned within the app’s FAQs.
