Whisper lasted a day

Dictation shipped with Whisper running locally: 31MB, nothing leaving your Mac, demoed beautifully. Then someone used it for real and got 13.8 seconds of silence before a single word showed up.

Here's the curious part. Whisper is trained on 30-second windows. It transcribes a buffer, not a stream. Every "live" Whisper demo you've ever watched is secretly re-running the model over a growing recording, which is why the words rewrite themselves behind you the longer you talk. No amount of knob-turning fixes an architecture.

macOS already ships a recognizer built for exactly this job. Swapping it in took one Swift file, and deleted four files, a Rust crate, and the 31MB model whole. The audio still never leaves your Mac.

One real loss: Whisper let us prime it with your characters' names, so it stopped inventing spellings. Apple's recognizer has no such knob yet. If it mangles your protagonist, that's why.