This AI app boosts my productivity in a way that Apple Intelligence can’t
The MacWhisper app offers speaker recognition capabilities, making it a suitable tool for transcribing interviews accurately. This feature allows for more organized and seamless transcription of interviews with multiple speakers. With this app, you can enhance your transcription process and streamline your workflow. The speaker recognition feature can help differentiate between different speakers, making it easier to attribute quotes and dialogue correctly. Consider trying out the MacWhisper app for improved transcription results.
Apple Intelligence offers a bunch of interesting features, but if you’ve tried most of them for more than a few minutes, you realize they’re not quite up to scratch compared to the best artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Image Playground is fine, for instance, but not particularly useful. Writing Tools work well enough but aren’t as ground-breaking as Apple might make out. And the less that’s said about Siri, the better.
The Gap in Transcription
The idea that Apple Intelligence is falling behind is well illustrated by the way it works in Apple’s Notes app. Here, Apple Intelligence can transcribe your audio recordings. That sounds great — it could be useful for making notes on your lectures or remembering what was said in a key business meeting. As a journalist, I’d like to use it for transcribing interviews. Except the problem is that Apple Intelligence doesn’t recognize speakers, so it requires tons of extra work to sort out who said what — especially in a lengthy recording. Even just a 30-minute audio track can require me to spend over an hour editing my notes to specify which phrase was uttered by which person. It’s a bore and a chore.
Introducing MacWhisper
Now, a different AI tool has come up with a great solution. That app is called MacWhisper, and it takes the Whisper transcription tech made by OpenAI, then wraps it up into a handy Mac app. Importantly, the latest version of MacWhisper adds speaker recognition to its arsenal. As long as you use an AI model that includes speaker recognition, different speakers now have their names highlighted in individual colors, and their words are also divided into separate color-coded blocks for quick identification. MacWhisper does all this automatically, without you needing to do a thing. It’s exactly what I wish Apple Intelligence was capable of.
Comparison with Other Tools
Before MacWhisper’s latest update, and with Apple Intelligence leaving me unimpressed, I’ve previously been using Otter. This offers fantastic quality when it comes to audio transcription, and it has had speaker recognition for years. But it also requires a subscription, and its monthly usage limits are quite strict for my uses. That means I’ve been searching for an alternative for a while. MacWhisper’s speaker recognition requires you to pay, but it’s a one-off fee, which I prefer (and right now, you can get 15% off with the code FINALLY to coincide with the update).
Because it uses OpenAI’s tech, the quality is superb. And for me, it’s better to pay a one-off fee and use the functionality as much as you like than to pay a recurring subscription and still hit the app’s limits. Simply put, MacWhisper is showing Apple how it’s done. I expect that Apple Intelligence’s transcription abilities will improve with time, but given how much Apple’s platform is lacking in other areas, transcription might not be much of a priority for the company. That means that right now, MacWhisper is set to become my transcription app of choice. If you record and transcribe meetings, lectures, audio messages and more, it’s worth a try.