Apple Might Bring AI Transcription To Voice Memos and Notes

Apple's plans for AI on the iPhone could bring real-time transcription to its Voice Memos and Notes apps, according to a report from AppleInsider: People familiar with the matter have told us that Apple has been working on AI-powered summarization and greatly enhanced audio transcription for several of its next-gen operating systems. The new features are expected to enable significant improvements in efficiency for users of its staple Notes, Voice Memos, and other apps. Apple is currently testing the capabilities as feature additions to several app updates scheduled to arrive with the release of iOS 18 later in 2024. They're also expected to make their way to the corresponding apps in macOS 15 and iPadOS 18 as well.

a class of user who will benefit

[Walt Dismal]

This will be invaluable for those of us who are deaf.

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[AmiMoJo]

Google has had this for years and it's one of the few voice functions I find useful. It's all done locally on the phone, and handy for taking notes when driving or repairing stuff.

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[echo123]

Came here to say this also. I find it invaluable for transcribing technical meetings, which I can turn into technical documentation. It even tries to detect different people by voice, and labeling the transcript as such.

I can copy/paste the resulting plain text into Notion [notion.so] for further editing, wiki-style. Possibly for 'publishing'.

The original transcript isn't perfect, but using Notion upon listening to it again, the transcript is not difficult to clean up with nice, easy to read formatting. Of all the tool

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[Plumpaquatsch]

Apple also "had this for years." What's your point?

FUTO

[bill_mcgonigle]

I already run local ML voice recognition to do transcription for me.

FUTO voice incorporates the open source Whisper 'AI' system.

Add this repo to your F-Droid:

https://app.futo.org/fdroid/re... [futo.org]

Not sure how to add a repo on Apple. Maybe crush the Magna Carta in an anvil or something.

Re: FUTO

[ZERO1ZERO]

Apparently those of is in europe will soon be able to experience adding a repo to our Apple devices soon. I for one welcome our third party apple repo overlords and will help them toil in their underground sugar cave.

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[bn-7bc]

Only those Europeans that are lucky enugh to live in an EU member country . Last I checked Norway was a European country, even an EEA member ( but sadly not EU) and we do not have alt app stores on apple devices

FUTO vs Recorder

[echo123]

Thanks for the very useful tip! Here's my results:

FUTO excels at taking *my* accurate voice dictation. It replaces Google's Gboard voice dictation aspect in settings, otherwise Gboard seems unchanged, and Futo is superior in results. Especially for punctuation, (although I haven't recently tested Gboard to see if it has improved, there's a limit to my Saturday morning testing effort). When I say 'comma' and 'full stop' I actually get commas and periods.

FUTO only runs as a Gboard voice dictation tool (and a

Battlestar Galactica

[gavron]

In the original 1979 TV series Battlestar Galactica, Commander Adama (Lorne Greene) dictates speech into a microphone and his words appear live on an Intertube (model) VT-132 compatible computer data terminal, highlighted as they appear, then back to normal text to join the previous text. Punctuation is perfect as is spelling and grammar. It's a great thing that Apple can now innovate to bring that previously science-fiction technology to the masses.

As a previous poster said, this will "be invaluable for

OMG, Apple is serious!

[gillbates]

Look, I'm trying really hard not to troll here, but the marketing on this is just insane. Advertising a feature (speech-to-text) as if it was new when Windows and Android have had that same feature for decades makes Apple and their users look hopelessly outdated.

Dragon Naturally Speaking would run on a Pentium 133 with 16MB of RAM and no internet connection in 1997. It worked.

If you need a new Apple product to do this, I would recommend considering donating your existing Apple device to a museum or s

Re: OMG, Apple is serious!

[ZERO1ZERO]

Apple already does excellent text to speech.

I think the story here is that it will be able to âunderstandâ(TM) the speech and therfore summarise and or make notes about the speech. Imagine if you could just have your iphone listen to a meeting or phonecall and have it create the minutes/actions automatically.

Re: OMG, Apple is serious!

[gillbates]

You mean like I have been able to do with my android phone for the past half decade?

Re: OMG, Apple is serious!

[ZERO1ZERO]

Congrats. But an android is not an iPhone is it.

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[bn-7bc]

Exactly, this is what people saying "Android has had feature x for a while" don't get, yes they are probably correct but it 's irelevant because ir hsn't made current Apple users switch, and the way comment sections work, the feature in question is allmost never mentioned before it's a very strong possibility thst Apple devices will get it within the next year, so unless people are extreamly inpatient the delay won't make said people switch. So what I don't get is why people waste their time with such com

Re: OMG, Apple is serious!

[gillbates]

If the appeal of an Apple product is to signal class superiority, why would they advertise features at all? Why do TTS if your userbase instead uses your product not for it's functionality, but for social status? Apple used to produce leading edge products but it seems they're so far behind they're now going for the computer nostalgia market.

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[Plumpaquatsch]

So after people with Apple devices had it. Congrats. (In the cloud since 2012, on device as an API since 2016)