Whisper

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 5 years (2022–2026), in 8 threads.

People raised many different problems with Whisper, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 8 complaints

Must record first, then wait for a single batch transcription with no live feedback2026-07-14
Transcription sometimes adds unwanted 'bye' or 'thank you' at the end of messages2025-12-13
Transcription fails on newer Nvidia cards and needs manual flags and Torch reinstalls2025-08-13
Hallucinates text without voice activity detection, making it almost unusable2025-03-21
Spent hours trying to enable MLX, hit cryptic Python and Torch errors2023-12-13
Transcription is too slow for interactive real-time conversational use2023-03-30
Local Whisper is finicky to set up unless you're a Python developer2023-03-08
Spent hours getting GPU working; cryptic CUDA errors block setup2022-09-28