at first i got very excited about a new fast transcription model (voz) but turns out its just parakeet v3 with some new inference code which is macOS/iOS specific

This is a cool idea. The most useful one for me would be something that can process pdf files into a json schema. Title and tag generation from a post would also be useful. I'm interested in web app though.

A lot of the models would be useful in a web context, to improve on the CMS we're making for clients. But they look like most of them are iOS only, few have a node package or something other, and all the benchmark are running it on modern iPhones so I doubt it would be that fast on a 20$ VPS.

Shiny layer of marketing and proprietary code on top of open models?

Voz is Parakeet 0.6B v3

Clear is DeepFilterNet 3

Ear is the language predictor from whisper-tiny

...

I wonder why they only support Apple platforms, citing CoreML. Doesn't Android have a similar framework, ML Kit?

This is a cool way of approaching AI models. I'm a big fan of local LLMs, local specific models like this should be even more powerful.

> Every model is free up to 100k monthly active devices. No tokens, no logins.

I dunno about the business model though. Cloud LLM billing makes sense: you're getting another computer to do work with each request, and using their compute via their gateway that they bill you.

These local models are like old school software. They're producing the weights, and then giving them to people. If I'm happy with the weights you've given me, and I'm not using your compute for inference and not wanting or needing any updates off you, why should you continue getting money off me and my customers?

The whole "but we need to keep it updated for your security" doesn't really work as well for software designed to run fully offline like these local models are.

I'm not saying they shouldn't get paid, but I guess I feel a personal sadness that it's less obvious how to successfully monetise such a sincerely useful and beneficial approach towards AI models.

I love this idea and hope to see more on-device models. How do they make money, though?

I tried out their demo for Clear, the audio quality improvement model.[0] I'm not sure if it's just I don't have refined enough an ear or their demo is broken, but the "raw" and "enhanced" versions sounded exactly the same to me.

[0] https://desertant.com/models/clear/