My current speech2text setup & opinions

hardware

Radeon 7800 XT, 16 GB VRAM. Most laptops won’t reproduce this.

My current speech2text setup & opinions:

• for just typing instead of writing i use Handy
  • Cohere transcribe is my transcription model
  • gemma4:latest served from ollama is my post-processing model
  • I use the default prompt for post processing:

Clean this transcript:
1. Fix spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors
2. Convert number words to digits (twenty-five → 25, ten percent → 10%, five dollars → $5)
3. Replace spoken punctuation with symbols (period → ., comma → ,, question mark → ?)
4. Remove filler words (um, uh, like as filler)
5. Keep the language in the original version (if it was french, keep it in french for example)

Preserve exact meaning and word order. Do not paraphrase or reorder content.

Return only the cleaned transcript.

Transcript:
${output}

Overall i’m very satisfied with how it works for both polish and english. I found that having a few short sessions (2-3 sentences at a time) works better than a long rambling one. Also feels less awkward for me than making the model sit through a long “uhhhhh” while i gather my thoughts, but I guess that’s my high agreeableness manifesting.

• for meeting transcriptions I use openwhispr
  • parakeet TDT 0.6B is my transcription model
  • Qwen3.5 9B is my post-processing model
  • im using the default prompt everywhere (i dont see what it is, but i didn’t set anything custom). Overall it’s very hit or miss. Speaker identification sucks which leads to wrong meeting notes.

Caveats: i have a reasonably powerful GPU (Radeon 7800 XT with 16gb of vram) so it’s likely most laptop folks won’t be able to replicate it on their hardware.

I have mostly gone with the “Recommended” settings and havent experimented a ton. I might try to use the same models in openwhispr as i do in handy and see if i get better results (idk if feasible).

I did also try the clickup speech2text for writing comments but i need to do more editing there because the tone reads super american & excited

Overall speech2text still feels somewhat unnatural to me. I see it’s value when I use it, but my mind instinctively reaches for typing as the input method.