To paraphrase Ansel Adams (who was speaking of cameras), "There is no one best tool for the job, only the best tool for the kind of thing you're trying to make."
Another way of saying it is that the world of software is so vast, from DIY homegrown to open source libraries to closed commercial apps that there isn't one "best" of any of it, or even 10 best.
I'd say your explorations will take you the furthest if you focus on a problem domain, learn all about it that you can, then find out what software exists in that problem space and whether or not the world would benefit from something new from you in that area.
I get your gist, but I'm not looking at this as a developer but as a journalist. The reason I specified tasks is it broadens the scope to "What I can use" from "What I must pay for".
For example, most people - and especially in my field where many journalists have old laptops - assume you could never run AI models yourself. Finding out Google Colab exists and has a liberal free tier was kinda crazy.
Another: the most privacy-safe way to transcribe interviews would be Whisper on-device, but the second best might be Whisper in a Colab doc. The uploaded files are deleted after each session and you can terminate the runtime and start a new one. AFAIK the data is relatively safer than other approaches (I prefer running transcription locally myself.) It only takes a line of code and a code block to get Whisper running, but few do this and for them, the space after that - Turboscribe, Notebook, etc - relies on compromising your data in some way or the other.
To paraphrase Ansel Adams (who was speaking of cameras), "There is no one best tool for the job, only the best tool for the kind of thing you're trying to make."
Another way of saying it is that the world of software is so vast, from DIY homegrown to open source libraries to closed commercial apps that there isn't one "best" of any of it, or even 10 best.
I'd say your explorations will take you the furthest if you focus on a problem domain, learn all about it that you can, then find out what software exists in that problem space and whether or not the world would benefit from something new from you in that area.
I get your gist, but I'm not looking at this as a developer but as a journalist. The reason I specified tasks is it broadens the scope to "What I can use" from "What I must pay for".
For example, most people - and especially in my field where many journalists have old laptops - assume you could never run AI models yourself. Finding out Google Colab exists and has a liberal free tier was kinda crazy.
Another: the most privacy-safe way to transcribe interviews would be Whisper on-device, but the second best might be Whisper in a Colab doc. The uploaded files are deleted after each session and you can terminate the runtime and start a new one. AFAIK the data is relatively safer than other approaches (I prefer running transcription locally myself.) It only takes a line of code and a code block to get Whisper running, but few do this and for them, the space after that - Turboscribe, Notebook, etc - relies on compromising your data in some way or the other.