CJ Pais has released transcribe.cpp, a cross-platform library that aims to support all of the major transcription models. It is designed as a mostly drop-in replacement for the model-specific whisper.cpp. The project serves as the new back end to his earlier Handy speech-to-text app.
This all seems promising. Transcription is widely useful and already practical to run locally on ordinary hardware, even without a GPU. As such, it should be at the frontier of the shift to local-first AI.
Hat tip to sebjones on Hacker News.