Apple's New SpeechAnalyzer API Hits 2.12% WER, Beating Whisper Small and Its Own Legacy Engine

get-inscribe.com / Hacker News·high signal

A benchmark of Apple's new on-device SpeechAnalyzer API measured a 2.12% word error rate on clean English audio, versus 3.74% for Whisper Small and 9.02% for the legacy SFSpeechRecognizer, while running ~3x faster than Whisper Small on an M2 Pro. The author concluded it is now the strongest on-device English transcription option measurable on Apple hardware, though Whisper still wins on language coverage and cross-platform support. The post drew 546 points and 221 comments on HN.