Subscription required - no thanks!
In what is certain to be an intentional omission from the store page, this app requires a $49/year subscription to transcribe for longer than 60 seconds. This is for an app which is merely wrapping an open source software package and model and which runs entirely on device - no thanks!
Shouldn’t be a subscription
This tool uses the on device whisper transcription model and using such an expensive subscription model is anti customer. Aiko app does the same for free.
Subscription for an offline app
First thing first - the developer is charging money for a purely offline app, based on an Whisper AI framework. There’s not a lot of unique stuff that warrants the subscription, but it’s a general and a nasty trend in software dev.
Well, though. Four stars because it’s actually somewhat useful. However, compared to some online-based apps like XRAI, there’s no choice of a microphone in settings. The thing is, the usually the speech captioning is used by deaf people that use hearing aids. Modern hearing aids, that cost like $1000 each, from Unitron and Phonak, even some $50000 cochlear implant processors have Bluetooth functionality that allows them to work as headphones and microphones. The thing is, these microphones are very high quality, much better than iPhone mics, and can beam form well even in crowd. XRAI allows to choose other devices as a mic, like hearing aids and AR glasses. This does not, and always defaults to internal iPhone mic. Would be great to have a functionality to choose the mic. Meanwhile, four stars.
Well, though. Four stars because it’s actually somewhat useful. However, compared to some online-based apps like XRAI, there’s no choice of a microphone in settings. The thing is, the usually the speech captioning is used by deaf people that use hearing aids. Modern hearing aids, that cost like $1000 each, from Unitron and Phonak, even some $50000 cochlear implant processors have Bluetooth functionality that allows them to work as headphones and microphones. The thing is, these microphones are very high quality, much better than iPhone mics, and can beam form well even in crowd. XRAI allows to choose other devices as a mic, like hearing aids and AR glasses. This does not, and always defaults to internal iPhone mic. Would be great to have a functionality to choose the mic. Meanwhile, four stars.
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