I turned @googlegemma EmbeddingGemma 2, an embedding model, into a speech-to-text model, and it turned out to be one of the fastest STT models you can run on device. On a base M3 MacBook Air it transcribes an hour of audio in about 13 seconds: 288× real time. The idea came in March with Gemini Embedding 2. It puts text, images, audio and video into one shared space, so a spoken word lands right next to the written word. If that's true, you should be able to read a transcript straight out of the embedding model. I couldnt tried it then, but last week EmbeddingGemma 2 came out as an open model, so I tried it.