TP-7 is such a perfect memo recorder. But the transcription app is only on iOS and only for English. Here’s an alternative—if you have an Apple Silicon m1/m2/m3 mac and if you’re proficient with the MacOS terminal, you can use OpenAI’s Whisper for amazing transcription in tons of languages:
First, if you don’t have ffmpeg at the ready:
brew install ffmpeg
(install Homebrew first if this doesn’t work)
Get the whisper cpp port with Metal hardware acceleration (apple silicon):
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp
Get the large language model with international language support:
bash ./models/download-ggml-model.sh large-v3
Mount TP-7 using FieldKit, then drag a file from Finder into the terminal to get the path where it says :
ffmpeg -i "<filename>" -sample_fmt s16 -ar 16000 "output.wav"
You can now transcribe the file. Using Apple Silicon’s GPU is at least 20 times as fast as using CPU, eating through half an hour of voice memos in just a few minutes. This command assumes Dutch (nl).
./main -l nl -m models/ggml-large-v3.bin output.wav
As a bonus, once you have this working you can batch convert by creating a script. Copy your TP-7 voice memo wavs to a folder called audio-TP7 and created an empty folder audio-16K, both on the same level as the whisper.cpp folder then
find audio-TP7 -name "*.wav" -type f -print0 | xargs -t -0 -I {} sh -c 'ffmpeg -n -i "{}" -sample_fmt s16 -ar 16000 "audio-16K/$(basename {})"'
find audio-16K -name "*.wav" -type f -print0 | xargs -t -0 -I {} sh -c 'whisper.cpp/main -l nl -m whisper.cpp/models/ggml-large-v3.bin -otxt -of "transcripts/$(basename {})" "{}"'
A bit specific but maybe someone is happy with this. YMMV!
