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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

As a heavy user of MacWhisper (for dictation), I'm looking forward to better speech-to-text models. MacWhisper with Whisper Large v3 Turbo model works fine, but latency adds up quickly, especially if you use online LLMs for post-processing (and it really improves things a lot).

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In my benchmarks Parakeet v3 actually beats Whisper Turbo on CER (3.8% vs 4.0% on BBC News audio) while being nearly 2x faster (25x vs 14x RT on M1). The accuracy gap may depend on audio type — Parakeet tends to be better on clean speech while Whisper handles noisy/accented audio more robustly.

Not sure if this will help but I've set up Handy [1] with Parakeet V2 for STT and gpt-oss-120b on Cerebras [2] for post-processing and I'm happy with the performance of this setup!

[1] https://handy.computer/ [2] https://www.cerebras.ai/

parakeet v3 is also nice, and better for most languages.

The latest build of Handy actually supports Parakeet V3 (among other models) under the covers. Agreed that it's a very solid multilingual model.

https://github.com/cjpais/Handy

But the advantage here is — what? That I don't have to pay for it? I'm glad it works for you, but I'm in a (solo) business setup where I'd much rather pay a (very reasonable) amount of money for a tool that gets things right and smooths out the edges.

MacWhisper supports 10x faster models with the same accuracy like Parakeet v2 (they were the first to do it 6-9 months ago). Have you tried those?

Yes. I found Parakeet V3 (1.24GB) to be worse than Whisper (Large v3 Turbo, 20240930). Subtly worse, but still. I went back to Whisper because with dictation if you can't trust the tool, you won't bother to dictate.

If you haven't already, give the models that Handy supports a try. They're not Whisper-large quality, but some of them are very fast.

the parakeet TDT models that are coreml optimized by fluid audio are hands down the fastest local models i’ve tried— worth checking out!

(unloading to the NPU is where the edge is)

https://huggingface.co/FluidInference/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2-c...

https://github.com/FluidInference/FluidAudio

The devs are responsive and active and nice on their discord too. You’ll find discussions on all the latest whizbangs with VAD, TTS, EOU etc

Handy with parakeet v2 is excellent

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