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wkcheng • today at 6:19 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

How does this compare with Parakeet? I've been using that locally in my projects on an M-series macbook and it's been working great. It's fast and accurate enough for my use cases (meeting transcription, audio transcription for demo videos, etc.)

This definitely seems lighter and faster. How does accuracy compare?


Replies

jwr • today at 7:25 PM

People keep praising Parakeet, but I've found it to be worse than Whisper Large. Yes, it is much, much faster and smaller, but accuracy matters a lot if you are to use dictation regularly and seriously.

I ended up having AI optimize Whisper Large and create a plugin for TypeWhisper, and that's what I use (feeding the results through local Qwen 3.8 running under MTPLX).

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theturtletalks • today at 6:44 PM

Parakeet is the gold standard. With models like moonshine and koroko (TTS model), it’s more about embedding the model in the application itself. If you’re using Parakeet, embedding it in the application is not feasible.

I use parakeet with superwhisper, and I’m making another app that has SST and TTS built in, and I want to use my downloaded parakeet model, but it seems there’s so many different implementations from ONNX to whisper, it’s not easy to use your downloaded models. So models like moonshine and this one allow you to just embed it into your application simply. It might not be as good as parakeet, but it gets you 80% of the way there.