{"slug": "parakeet", "name": "Parakeet", "category": "ai", "category_name": "AI models and assistants", "description": "NVIDIA's open-weight family of automatic speech recognition (speech-to-text) models.", "recommenders": 27, "commenters": 45, "warners": 1, "score": 28.464, "rising": 3.11, "first": "2025-11-14", "latest": "2026-10-28", "why": "HN commenters like it for fast, on-device speech-to-text, often running it for dictation through apps like Handy and Hex.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 31, "neutral": 13, "compare": 4, "warn": 2}, "spark": [0, 0, 5, 4, 0, 1, 0, 5, 7, 0, 3, 6], "listed": true, "loved": ["Speed", "Runs locally"], "caveat": "Accuracy vs Whisper", "short_quote": "I haven\u2019t found an ASR/STT/transcription setup that beats Parakeet V3 on the speed/accuracy tradeoff spectrum", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["Parakeet", "Parakeet V3", "Parakeet v3", "Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3", "NVIDIA Parakeet", "Nvidia Parakeet", "NVIDIA Parakeet V3", "Nvidia Parakeet V3"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters like it for fast, on-device speech-to-text", "cites": [{"id": 783497233, "item_id": 48968577, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968577", "by": "d4rkp4ttern", "date": "2026-07-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "near instant transcription with Parakeet V3", "excerpt": "I use the Hex[1] app on MacOs for near instant transcription with Parakeet V3. This is how I speak to Code agents at least 80% of the time. The idea is - I tend to be lazy if I need to type lots of details, so speaking lets me get into details that I otherwise wouldn\u2019t and this helps give more useful context to the agent. This often tends to be an unstructured brain dump so I sometimes ask the agent to repeat back wh", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb"}, {"id": 779307074, "item_id": 48706692, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48706692", "by": "d4rkp4ttern", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Near-instant accurate-enough transcription using local Parakeet V3.", "excerpt": "My current fav STT is Hex, MacOS only: https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex Near-instant accurate-enough transcription using local Parakeet V3. Handy is multi-platform, also great: https://github.com/cjpais/Handy Every time a new STT model or app is announced, I see if it displaces Hex for me but so far none have. I\u2019ll check out Yap though.", "context": "", "use_case": "local transcription model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Yap \u2013 free offline voice dictation for Mac/Windows/Linux (Wispr Flow alt)"}, {"id": 777394448, "item_id": 48587153, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587153", "by": "rob", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "was completely surprised at just how fast it was for being on-device!", "excerpt": "Yep, here's the v2 and v3: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 It's almost instant on my new M5 Max w/ 36GB of memory, but I used both with Handy on my previous 2019 Intel Mac w/ 16GB memory and was completely surprised at just how fast it was for being on-device! Not instant, but only a couple seconds.", "context": "", "use_case": "on-device speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "DeepSeek Introduces Vision"}, {"id": 802705664, "item_id": 50169104, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50169104", "by": "7777777phil", "date": "2026-10-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "been pretty impressed with the local performance", "excerpt": "I have been using different Parakeet models for STT over the past months and been pretty impressed with the local performance.", "context": "", "use_case": "local speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Voxtral 3"}]}, {"text": ", often running it for dictation through apps like Handy and Hex.", "cites": [{"id": 782379585, "item_id": 48898724, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48898724", "by": "bel8", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's  great for me when configured to use Parakeet v3.", "excerpt": "Obligatory mention of Handy which is open-source and cross-platform: https://github.com/cjpais/Handy It's great for me when configured to use Parakeet v3.", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"}, {"id": 754325136, "item_id": 47145321, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145321", "by": "Karrot_Kream", "date": "2026-02-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Parakeet V3 with Handy and it works great locally for me.", "excerpt": "According to the OpenASR Leaderboard [1], looks like Parakeet V2/V3 and Canary-Qwen (a Qwen finetune) handily beat Moonshine. All 3 models are open, but Parakeet is the smallest of the 3. I use Parakeet V3 with Handy and it works great locally for me. [1]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard", "context": "", "use_case": "local speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Moonshine Open-Weights STT models \u2013 higher accuracy than WhisperLargev3"}, {"id": 746162753, "item_id": 46635172, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46635172", "by": "peterldowns", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Parakeet v3 works great with it.", "excerpt": "Huge fan! Parakeet v3 works great with it. I have used Monologue, Superwhisper, and Aqua, at various times in the past. But Handy is at least as good, and it's not an expensive subscription. I love that it runs locally, too. Strongly recommend!", "context": "", "use_case": "speech recognition model in Handy", "switched_from": "", "story": "Handy \u2013 free open source speech-to-text app"}, {"id": 783497233, "item_id": 48968577, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968577", "by": "d4rkp4ttern", "date": "2026-07-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "near instant transcription with Parakeet V3", "excerpt": "I use the Hex[1] app on MacOs for near instant transcription with Parakeet V3. This is how I speak to Code agents at least 80% of the time. The idea is - I tend to be lazy if I need to type lots of details, so speaking lets me get into details that I otherwise wouldn\u2019t and this helps give more useful context to the agent. This often tends to be an unstructured brain dump so I sometimes ask the agent to repeat back wh", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb"}]}, {"text": " The most common complaint is that some users find it less accurate than Whisper", "cites": [{"id": 791599409, "item_id": 49474963, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474963", "by": "jwr", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I keep hearing that Nvidia Parakeet models are better, but they just don't work as well for me", "excerpt": "It's interesting that the results can be so different depending on the person, the use case and even the microphone used. I use dictation a lot, so I try to stay up to date with the latest models as much as I can. So far, for my needs, nothing could beat Whisper Large v3. I keep hearing that Nvidia Parakeet models are better, but they just don't work as well for me, even though they are unquestionably faster. Things ", "context": "", "use_case": "dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gemini-3.5-Transcribe"}, {"id": 734901825, "item_id": 45931364, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45931364", "by": "lxe", "date": "2025-11-14", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I originally used Whisper and then switched to Parakeet. I much prefer whisper after playing with both.", "excerpt": "I've done something similar for Linux and Mac. I originally used Whisper and then switched to Parakeet. I much prefer whisper after playing with both. Maybe I'm not configuring Parakeet correctly, But the transcription that comes out of Whisper is usually pretty much spot on. It automatically removes all the \"ooms\" and all the \"ahs\" and it's just way more natural, in my opinion. I'm using Whisper.CPP with CUDA accele", "context": "built dictation tools for Linux and Mac", "use_case": "voice dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Chirp \u2013 Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required"}, {"id": 800172209, "item_id": 50010763, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50010763", "by": "jwr", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Yes, it is much, much faster and smaller, but accuracy matters a lot", "excerpt": "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).", "context": "", "use_case": "dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}]}, {"text": ", even though they agree it is faster.", "cites": [{"id": 800172209, "item_id": 50010763, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50010763", "by": "jwr", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Yes, it is much, much faster and smaller, but accuracy matters a lot", "excerpt": "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).", "context": "", "use_case": "dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}, {"id": 791599409, "item_id": 49474963, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474963", "by": "jwr", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I keep hearing that Nvidia Parakeet models are better, but they just don't work as well for me", "excerpt": "It's interesting that the results can be so different depending on the person, the use case and even the microphone used. I use dictation a lot, so I try to stay up to date with the latest models as much as I can. So far, for my needs, nothing could beat Whisper Large v3. I keep hearing that Nvidia Parakeet models are better, but they just don't work as well for me, even though they are unquestionably faster. Things ", "context": "", "use_case": "dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gemini-3.5-Transcribe"}, {"id": 747870161, "item_id": 46741885, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741885", "by": "vulkoingim", "date": "2026-01-24", "stance": "compare", "quote": "mostly using parakeet v3 on my desktop, but it tends to do a bit more errors, although it is very fast", "excerpt": "I'm using https://spokenly.app/ in local mode, which is free. Very happy with it. It supports a bunch of models, including whisper and parakeet. Right now I'm mostly using parakeet v3 on my desktop, but it tends to do a bit more errors, although it is very fast. I cycle betwen it and Distil-Whisper Large V3.5, which is a bit slower. On iOS I'm also using the same app, with the Apple Speech model, which I found out to", "context": "", "use_case": "desktop speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Speed", "summary": "Commenters describe transcription as near-instant or a couple of seconds even on older hardware.", "quotes": [{"id": 783497233, "item_id": 48968577, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968577", "by": "d4rkp4ttern", "date": "2026-07-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "near instant transcription with Parakeet V3", "excerpt": "I use the Hex[1] app on MacOs for near instant transcription with Parakeet V3. This is how I speak to Code agents at least 80% of the time. The idea is - I tend to be lazy if I need to type lots of details, so speaking lets me get into details that I otherwise wouldn\u2019t and this helps give more useful context to the agent. This often tends to be an unstructured brain dump so I sometimes ask the agent to repeat back wh", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb"}, {"id": 777394448, "item_id": 48587153, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587153", "by": "rob", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "was completely surprised at just how fast it was for being on-device!", "excerpt": "Yep, here's the v2 and v3: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 It's almost instant on my new M5 Max w/ 36GB of memory, but I used both with Handy on my previous 2019 Intel Mac w/ 16GB memory and was completely surprised at just how fast it was for being on-device! Not instant, but only a couple seconds.", "context": "", "use_case": "on-device speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "DeepSeek Introduces Vision"}, {"id": 800318784, "item_id": 50019924, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50019924", "by": "gekoxyz", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "The good thing with most NNs is that you can go with fp32 almost always (I put almost because I'm not 100% sure that this covers all the cases) for almost 0 performance degradation. For Parakeet I'm 100% sure because I used it yesterday and it was using just 1GB. Why do you use GLM 5.3 tho? Unless you have an instance running \"free\" 24/7 you could use a local Gemma model. It should be good enough, no? Or maybe with o", "context": "", "use_case": "speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}]}, {"label": "Runs locally", "summary": "Commenters say it handles local transcription well enough to replace cloud tools for personal use.", "quotes": [{"id": 782392945, "item_id": 48899559, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48899559", "by": "cootsnuck", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Nvidia's Parakeet v3 is good enough for my own just local transcription most of the time.", "excerpt": "For just desktop, I use Handy (open source): https://handy.computer/ And yea, Nvidia's Parakeet v3 is good enough for my own just local transcription most of the time. When I need local transcription to be more reliable and I don't have the energy to proof read a long ramble, I still often just pop open chatGPT, dictate, cut, paste. But we're pretty much already to the point where local transcription models can repla", "context": "", "use_case": "local transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"}, {"id": 750210208, "item_id": 46888138, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46888138", "by": "pietz", "date": "2026-02-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "That has been my go-to model locally and it's hard to imagine there's something even better.", "excerpt": "Do we know if this is better than Nvidia Parakeet V3? That has been my go-to model locally and it's hard to imagine there's something even better.", "context": "", "use_case": "local speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Voxtral Transcribe 2"}, {"id": 746253696, "item_id": 46640856, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640856", "by": "fittingopposite", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Nvidia's Parakeet v3, which is the (?) leading STT model.", "excerpt": "With the remote setup of Claude Code (e.g. [1]) I can know (vibe)code from my phone. But typing has been a pain. Didn't find a great speech to text app for Android featuring Nvidia's Parakeet v3, which is the (?) leading STT model. Found this repo. It's working flawlessly. Checked it with adb (I am always a bit suspicious). And it's really fully local. Highly recommend :) [1] https://github.com/rberg27/doom-coding", "context": "", "use_case": "offline speech to text on Android", "switched_from": "", "story": "Offline voice input keyboard for Android using Nvidia's Parakeet v3"}]}, {"label": "Accuracy", "summary": "Several commenters call it reliable, and some say it beats Whisper.", "quotes": [{"id": 782364176, "item_id": 48897761, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48897761", "by": "dinfinity", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Parakeet V3 via this tool and it is actually quite reliable for me (in English)", "excerpt": "I use Parakeet V3 via this tool and it is actually quite reliable for me (in English): https://github.com/cjpais/Handy", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"}, {"id": 782335713, "item_id": 48895982, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895982", "by": "trencedamp", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it's perfect with parakeet.", "excerpt": "Came here to post this. I use handy on my own machine and it's perfect with parakeet. If I switch to whisper it makes lots of mistakes", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "Whisper", "story": "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"}, {"id": 779296673, "item_id": 48706042, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48706042", "by": "taffydavid", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "you can use parakeet v3 which I find way better than whisper", "excerpt": "I love on-device transcription apps, but this looks like yet another AI generated whisper wrapper. I'm put off by the readme which is clearly LLM generated, with emdash all over the place and bits that smell of user questions turned into talking points. > Why not the Fn / key? It's the obvious one-finger choice, but on macOS the Fn key emits no real keypress \u2014 only a hidden hardware flag \u2014 so And > macOS permissions ", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Yap \u2013 free offline voice dictation for Mac/Windows/Linux (Wispr Flow alt)"}]}, {"label": "Dictation app support", "summary": "It is commonly used inside dictation apps such as Handy, Hex, Spokenly and MacWhisper.", "quotes": [{"id": 782379585, "item_id": 48898724, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48898724", "by": "bel8", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's  great for me when configured to use Parakeet v3.", "excerpt": "Obligatory mention of Handy which is open-source and cross-platform: https://github.com/cjpais/Handy It's great for me when configured to use Parakeet v3.", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"}, {"id": 746162753, "item_id": 46635172, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46635172", "by": "peterldowns", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Parakeet v3 works great with it.", "excerpt": "Huge fan! Parakeet v3 works great with it. I have used Monologue, Superwhisper, and Aqua, at various times in the past. But Handy is at least as good, and it's not an expensive subscription. I love that it runs locally, too. Strongly recommend!", "context": "", "use_case": "speech recognition model in Handy", "switched_from": "", "story": "Handy \u2013 free open source speech-to-text app"}, {"id": 774658404, "item_id": 48416150, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416150", "by": "Charlieholtz", "date": "2026-06-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Spokenly (with Parakeet as the model ) for local speech-to-text", "excerpt": "I'm biased (I'm the creator) but I use Conductor every day. I've recently switched to Opus 4.8 (fast mode always on) as my default model but swap in GPT-5.5 quite a bit for reviewing Opus's work. My flow is something like: - Create a new workspace for a specific bug/feature - Ramble into the input box. I use a goose neck microphone and Spokenly (with Parakeet as the model ) for local speech-to-text - Hit enter! I don", "context": "creator of Conductor", "use_case": "speech-to-text model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)"}]}, {"label": "Voice pipelines", "summary": "Commenters use it as the speech-to-text stage in home voice assistants alongside local LLMs and TTS.", "quotes": [{"id": 800362640, "item_id": 50022665, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50022665", "by": "cco", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "parakeet for STT", "excerpt": "Yeah maybe I'll play around with different precision, I did see improvement when I went from fp4 to full fidelity though. This is my setup for Home Assistant voice, parakeet for STT, GLM 5.3 to generate responses, and Kokoro for TTS. I use local routing for simple commands like turn on the lights, but if I want to ask questions or something, it gets routed to GLM 5.3. It is basically free, half a cent per turn maybe,", "context": "", "use_case": "speech-to-text for Home Assistant voice", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}, {"id": 747869424, "item_id": 46741839, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741839", "by": "andhuman", "date": "2026-01-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used nvidia parakeet as STT", "excerpt": "I built this recently. I used nvidia parakeet as STT, open wake word as the wake word detection, mistral ministral 14b as LLM and pocket tts for tts. Fits snugly in my 16 gb VRAM. Pocket is small and fast and has good enough voice cloning. I first used the chatterbox turbo model, which perform better and even supported some simple paralinguistic word like (chuckle) that made it more fun, but it was just a bit too big", "context": "", "use_case": "speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?"}, {"id": 781186609, "item_id": 48824163, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48824163", "by": "janpmz", "date": "2026-07-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Parakeet for STT", "excerpt": "Both Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text now have local models that are good enough to get the job done. Kokoro for TTS, Parakeet for STT and Fluid-1 for text formatting (I use it with FluidVoice). I hope this is a trend that continues for other applications.", "context": "", "use_case": "local speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro"}]}, {"label": "Language coverage", "summary": "Commenters report good results for Mandarin, and use it for English and Spanish.", "quotes": [{"id": 782398833, "item_id": 48899927, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48899927", "by": "tapland", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Parakeet has great mandarin>CN text", "excerpt": "I use Systran/faster-whisper-medium for real-time subtitling, but you need to get used to the context it's used it and the weirdness it translates into. Parakeet has great mandarin>CN text, but running that + a translation model has been tricky and I never got it fast.", "context": "", "use_case": "Mandarin transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"}, {"id": 777387488, "item_id": 48586718, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586718", "by": "rafaelm", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use it too in Handy, for English and Spanish transcriptions", "excerpt": "I believe this is the correct link. I use it too in Handy, for English and Spanish transcriptions: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3", "context": "", "use_case": "English and Spanish transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "DeepSeek Introduces Vision"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Accuracy vs Whisper", "summary": "Some commenters get better transcripts from Whisper Large, despite Parakeet being faster.", "quotes": [{"id": 800172209, "item_id": 50010763, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50010763", "by": "jwr", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Yes, it is much, much faster and smaller, but accuracy matters a lot", "excerpt": "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).", "context": "", "use_case": "dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}, {"id": 791599409, "item_id": 49474963, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474963", "by": "jwr", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I keep hearing that Nvidia Parakeet models are better, but they just don't work as well for me", "excerpt": "It's interesting that the results can be so different depending on the person, the use case and even the microphone used. I use dictation a lot, so I try to stay up to date with the latest models as much as I can. So far, for my needs, nothing could beat Whisper Large v3. I keep hearing that Nvidia Parakeet models are better, but they just don't work as well for me, even though they are unquestionably faster. Things ", "context": "", "use_case": "dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gemini-3.5-Transcribe"}, {"id": 734901825, "item_id": 45931364, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45931364", "by": "lxe", "date": "2025-11-14", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I originally used Whisper and then switched to Parakeet. I much prefer whisper after playing with both.", "excerpt": "I've done something similar for Linux and Mac. I originally used Whisper and then switched to Parakeet. I much prefer whisper after playing with both. Maybe I'm not configuring Parakeet correctly, But the transcription that comes out of Whisper is usually pretty much spot on. It automatically removes all the \"ooms\" and all the \"ahs\" and it's just way more natural, in my opinion. I'm using Whisper.CPP with CUDA accele", "context": "built dictation tools for Linux and Mac", "use_case": "voice dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Chirp \u2013 Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required"}]}, {"label": "More errors", "summary": "One user says it tends to make somewhat more errors than slower models.", "quotes": [{"id": 747870161, "item_id": 46741885, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741885", "by": "vulkoingim", "date": "2026-01-24", "stance": "compare", "quote": "mostly using parakeet v3 on my desktop, but it tends to do a bit more errors, although it is very fast", "excerpt": "I'm using https://spokenly.app/ in local mode, which is free. Very happy with it. It supports a bunch of models, including whisper and parakeet. Right now I'm mostly using parakeet v3 on my desktop, but it tends to do a bit more errors, although it is very fast. I cycle betwen it and Distil-Whisper Large V3.5, which is a bit slower. On iOS I'm also using the same app, with the Apple Speech model, which I found out to", "context": "", "use_case": "desktop speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?"}]}, {"label": "Hard to embed", "summary": "One commenter says embedding it in an application is not feasible because of fragmented implementations.", "quotes": [{"id": 800162656, "item_id": 50010166, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50010166", "by": "theturtletalks", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Parakeet is the gold standard.", "excerpt": "Parakeet is the gold standard. With models like moonshine and koroko (TTS model), it\u2019s more about embedding the model in the application itself. If you\u2019re using Parakeet, embedding it in the application is not feasible. I use parakeet with superwhisper, and I\u2019m making another app that has SST and TTS built in, and I want to use my downloaded parakeet model, but it seems there\u2019s so many different implementations from ", "context": "building an app with STT and TTS", "use_case": "speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}]}, {"label": "Punctuation commands", "summary": "One user says it does not respect spoken punctuation commands.", "quotes": [{"id": 784522241, "item_id": 49032640, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49032640", "by": "treetalker", "date": "2026-07-24", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "I\u2019m a dictaphone fan. Even better than the kind shown in the article are the ones with sliding switches. I have an Olympus model. Mine has both internal memory and SD card capability. And similar to what the author aspires to, I record bits and bobs throughout the day and then use the SD card to transfer them to my Mac. From there, they automatically get added to a MacWhisper watch folder and then automatically trans", "context": "", "use_case": "speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Calm technologies that excite me"}]}, {"label": "Technical jargon", "summary": "One commenter found a forked model handled tech jargon better than vanilla Parakeet.", "quotes": [{"id": 796988018, "item_id": 49811751, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49811751", "by": "zenapollo", "date": "2026-09-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "vanilla parakeet i use in handy", "excerpt": "Not sure if finetune is the right word here, but their default local model seems to be an in-house fork of parakeet (?, maybe whisper) that works a bit better on tech jargon than vanilla parakeet i use in handy. Though has a few other quirks. Take with a grain of salt as I\u2019m a low volume user, but it\u2019s been enjoyable to test. I kept my wife on handy while i test this one.", "context": "low volume user", "use_case": "local speech model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Anyone using a Wispr Flow alternative that is non-cloud?"}]}], "who": [{"by": "nl", "context": "builds ESP32 transcription device", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50015141", "date": "2026-10-09"}, {"by": "theturtletalks", "context": "building an app with STT and TTS", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50010166", "date": "2026-10-08"}, {"by": "zenapollo", "context": "low volume user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49811751", "date": "2026-09-23"}, {"by": "Charlieholtz", "context": "creator of Conductor", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416150", "date": "2026-06-05"}, {"by": "d4rkp4ttern", "context": "macOS user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47948352", "date": "2026-04-29"}], "tags": ["for local dictation", "for voice assistants", "for talking to coding agents", "for macOS users", "runs on-device"], "use_cases": ["speech-to-text", "speech transcription", "speech recognition", "local speech-to-text", "speech recognition model", "speech-to-text model"], "compared": [{"slug": "handy", "name": "Handy", "co": 24, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "whisper", "name": "Whisper", "co": 10, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "hex", "name": "Hex", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "superwhisper", "name": "Superwhisper", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "pocket-tts", "name": "Pocket-TTS", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "whistle", "name": "Whistle", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "whisper-large", "name": "Whisper Large", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "macwhisper", "name": "MacWhisper", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731068", "title": "Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?", "mentions": 8}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50008427", "title": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB", "mentions": 7}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894752", "title": "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor", "mentions": 5}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48703848", "title": "Yap \u2013 free offline voice dictation for Mac/Windows/Linux (Wispr Flow alt)", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48581458", "title": "DeepSeek Introduces Vision", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46886735", "title": "Voxtral Transcribe 2", "mentions": 2}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"warn": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 5, "compare": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 1}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 5, "compare": 1, "neutral": 3}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 7, "neutral": 3}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 1}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 6, "compare": 2, "neutral": 2}}, "quotes": [{"id": 804507330, "item_id": 50281708, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50281708", "by": "betterproblems", "date": "2026-10-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used nemotron 3.5 int4 and parakeet 0.6 tdt v3 int4 as the transcriber.", "excerpt": "This is pretty cool. How do I get my own app (app.usequickspeak.fyi) on the website? I used nemotron 3.5 int4 and parakeet 0.6 tdt v3 int4 as the transcriber.", "context": "", "use_case": "transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Meeting Notes Takers"}, {"id": 802705664, "item_id": 50169104, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50169104", "by": "7777777phil", "date": "2026-10-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "been pretty impressed with the local performance", "excerpt": "I have been using different Parakeet models for STT over the past months and been pretty impressed with the local performance.", "context": "", "use_case": "local speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Voxtral 3"}, {"id": 800378097, "item_id": 50023631, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50023631", "by": "andai", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "compare", "quote": "ported my little voice typing gui to use Whistle/Needle instead of Parakeet", "excerpt": "I made a little gui for it. (Or rather, ported my little voice typing gui to use Whistle/Needle instead of Parakeet. Only had to change like 2 lines!) https://gist.github.com/a-n-d-a-i/56ac707eacd8144f83d3651be43b47ef Seems to do roughly as well as parakeet (both speed and quality) so far. I use it on Linux. I think it's cross platform but I haven't tested it. Would love to know! Should be trivial (2 mins of Codex) t", "context": "", "use_case": "speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}, {"id": 800362640, "item_id": 50022665, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50022665", "by": "cco", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "parakeet for STT", "excerpt": "Yeah maybe I'll play around with different precision, I did see improvement when I went from fp4 to full fidelity though. This is my setup for Home Assistant voice, parakeet for STT, GLM 5.3 to generate responses, and Kokoro for TTS. I use local routing for simple commands like turn on the lights, but if I want to ask questions or something, it gets routed to GLM 5.3. It is basically free, half a cent per turn maybe,", "context": "", "use_case": "speech-to-text for Home Assistant voice", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}, {"id": 800318784, "item_id": 50019924, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50019924", "by": "gekoxyz", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "", "excerpt": "The good thing with most NNs is that you can go with fp32 almost always (I put almost because I'm not 100% sure that this covers all the cases) for almost 0 performance degradation. For Parakeet I'm 100% sure because I used it yesterday and it was using just 1GB. Why do you use GLM 5.3 tho? Unless you have an instance running \"free\" 24/7 you could use a local Gemma model. It should be good enough, no? Or maybe with o", "context": "", "use_case": "speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}, {"id": 800255600, "item_id": 50015975, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50015975", "by": "aavisangle", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 (int8 CoreML, about 470 MB) runs on-device through FluidAudio's AsrManager", "excerpt": "Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 (int8 CoreML, about 470 MB) runs on-device through FluidAudio's AsrManager, pinned to CPU plus the Neural Engine.", "context": "", "use_case": "on-device speech recognition", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Got a Mac for running agents? what's your setup?"}, {"id": 800242256, "item_id": 50015141, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50015141", "by": "nl", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "offloads transcription to Parakeet running in the browser connected to the ESP32", "excerpt": "I recently built a 3D printed ESP32 based transcription device[1] that offloads transcription to Parakeet running in the browser connected to the ESP32. I haven't done my own measurements of error rate but it'd be interesting to see how well this runs on the ESP32 itself. In my case I'm already using one core to run DSP for a beamforming mic array (which works amazingly well for noise cancellation!) so I don't have h", "context": "builds ESP32 transcription device", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}, {"id": 800172209, "item_id": 50010763, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50010763", "by": "jwr", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Yes, it is much, much faster and smaller, but accuracy matters a lot", "excerpt": "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).", "context": "", "use_case": "dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}, {"id": 800162656, "item_id": 50010166, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50010166", "by": "theturtletalks", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Parakeet is the gold standard.", "excerpt": "Parakeet is the gold standard. With models like moonshine and koroko (TTS model), it\u2019s more about embedding the model in the application itself. If you\u2019re using Parakeet, embedding it in the application is not feasible. I use parakeet with superwhisper, and I\u2019m making another app that has SST and TTS built in, and I want to use my downloaded parakeet model, but it seems there\u2019s so many different implementations from ", "context": "building an app with STT and TTS", "use_case": "speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}, {"id": 800150513, "item_id": 50009407, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009407", "by": "cgbur", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use https://github.com/cjpais/Handy on Parakeet streaming", "excerpt": "For essentially infinite and fast dictation I use https://github.com/cjpais/Handy on Parakeet streaming (cohere is far better, but slower and has a token output limit so you cant ramble for many minutes). And then just do a cleanup pass with a cheap LLM, it will in my experience, do far better than trying to voice control to go edit a sentence or change words. I just weave instructions into my writing. I understand t", "context": "", "use_case": "streaming speech recognition", "switched_from": "", "story": "Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB"}, {"id": 797773937, "item_id": 49860871, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49860871", "by": "gunalx", "date": "2026-09-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "parakeet for speed", "excerpt": "Whisper is still pretty good over all. At least if you need multilingual support. Other mentions is parakeet for speed and maybe qwen3 asr.", "context": "", "use_case": "fast speech recognition", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What would be the best local ASR model"}, {"id": 796988018, "item_id": 49811751, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49811751", "by": "zenapollo", "date": "2026-09-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "vanilla parakeet i use in handy", "excerpt": "Not sure if finetune is the right word here, but their default local model seems to be an in-house fork of parakeet (?, maybe whisper) that works a bit better on tech jargon than vanilla parakeet i use in handy. Though has a few other quirks. Take with a grain of salt as I\u2019m a low volume user, but it\u2019s been enjoyable to test. I kept my wife on handy while i test this one.", "context": "low volume user", "use_case": "local speech model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Anyone using a Wispr Flow alternative that is non-cloud?"}, {"id": 795884403, "item_id": 49742775, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49742775", "by": "nowittyusername", "date": "2026-09-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "asr (parakeet v3), tts (omnivoice) take no more then 400-450 ms total", "excerpt": "I been working and making things with AI agents since Windsurf days, here's what works for me after experimenting and working for a while with these things. As far as the agent goes I find whatever the latest OpenAI model is out worked best for me. This company has burned me the least and I like the models. I tried many but consistency of OpenAI models cant be beat IMO. Though we are post honeymoon phase now I feel l", "context": "", "use_case": "speech recognition for voice agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Share your AI Setup, Learn from others"}, {"id": 792279808, "item_id": 49517488, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49517488", "by": "dghlsakjg", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Parakeet for transcription and senior for diarization.", "excerpt": "Parakeet for transcription and senior for diarization. Check out the fluid-ml library which packages this up for ANE very nicely.", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio"}, {"id": 791599409, "item_id": 49474963, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474963", "by": "jwr", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I keep hearing that Nvidia Parakeet models are better, but they just don't work as well for me", "excerpt": "It's interesting that the results can be so different depending on the person, the use case and even the microphone used. I use dictation a lot, so I try to stay up to date with the latest models as much as I can. So far, for my needs, nothing could beat Whisper Large v3. I keep hearing that Nvidia Parakeet models are better, but they just don't work as well for me, even though they are unquestionably faster. Things ", "context": "", "use_case": "dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gemini-3.5-Transcribe"}, {"id": 790877217, "item_id": 49429826, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49429826", "by": "sourcetms", "date": "2026-08-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "it's a local speech to text tool using NVIDIA Parakeet", "excerpt": "I built a project called Resonant - it's a local speech to text tool using NVIDIA Parakeet and supports a few other languages. Originally started as an experiment to see what could I, and how far could I go building with LLMs to replace my own software stack. I spent a lot of time on positioning and design. The thing is like 10% model 90% unique, random, obscure features I had to run into walls for days to identify h", "context": "", "use_case": "speech recognition model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2026 \u2013 Show and tell"}, {"id": 785300225, "item_id": 49081264, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49081264", "by": "d3k", "date": "2026-07-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "(using Parakeet)", "excerpt": "Seems nice! I have been using Handy https://handy.computer/ for a while and I am happy with it (using Parakeet), this seems quite similar in terms of features, except that is uses Apple's APIs.", "context": "", "use_case": "speech recognition model for dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Yap \u2013 OSS on-device voice dictation for macOS with no model to download"}, {"id": 784736673, "item_id": 49046042, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49046042", "by": "janantos", "date": "2026-07-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "near realtime spoken word translation/transcription project using selfhosted Gemma4 and Nvidia Parakeet LLM models", "excerpt": "Tbh, I don\u2019t want to be part of codeberg anymore, their community moved away from my believes. And as I have another projects being according them not welcomed there because they are tied to LLM ecosystem. I have prof of concept of AI coding agent entirely written in bash and also near realtime spoken word translation/transcription project using selfhosted Gemma4 and Nvidia Parakeet LLM models. In their latest blog t", "context": "", "use_case": "self-hosted transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Brow6el: A full-featured web browser for the terminal using Chromium"}, {"id": 784522241, "item_id": 49032640, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49032640", "by": "treetalker", "date": "2026-07-24", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "I\u2019m a dictaphone fan. Even better than the kind shown in the article are the ones with sliding switches. I have an Olympus model. Mine has both internal memory and SD card capability. And similar to what the author aspires to, I record bits and bobs throughout the day and then use the SD card to transfer them to my Mac. From there, they automatically get added to a MacWhisper watch folder and then automatically trans", "context": "", "use_case": "speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Calm technologies that excite me"}, {"id": 783497233, "item_id": 48968577, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968577", "by": "d4rkp4ttern", "date": "2026-07-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "near instant transcription with Parakeet V3", "excerpt": "I use the Hex[1] app on MacOs for near instant transcription with Parakeet V3. This is how I speak to Code agents at least 80% of the time. The idea is - I tend to be lazy if I need to type lots of details, so speaking lets me get into details that I otherwise wouldn\u2019t and this helps give more useful context to the agent. This often tends to be an unstructured brain dump so I sometimes ask the agent to repeat back wh", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb"}, {"id": 782398833, "item_id": 48899927, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48899927", "by": "tapland", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Parakeet has great mandarin>CN text", "excerpt": "I use Systran/faster-whisper-medium for real-time subtitling, but you need to get used to the context it's used it and the weirdness it translates into. Parakeet has great mandarin>CN text, but running that + a translation model has been tricky and I never got it fast.", "context": "", "use_case": "Mandarin transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"}, {"id": 782392945, "item_id": 48899559, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48899559", "by": "cootsnuck", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Nvidia's Parakeet v3 is good enough for my own just local transcription most of the time.", "excerpt": "For just desktop, I use Handy (open source): https://handy.computer/ And yea, Nvidia's Parakeet v3 is good enough for my own just local transcription most of the time. When I need local transcription to be more reliable and I don't have the energy to proof read a long ramble, I still often just pop open chatGPT, dictate, cut, paste. But we're pretty much already to the point where local transcription models can repla", "context": "", "use_case": "local transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"}, {"id": 782379585, "item_id": 48898724, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48898724", "by": "bel8", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's  great for me when configured to use Parakeet v3.", "excerpt": "Obligatory mention of Handy which is open-source and cross-platform: https://github.com/cjpais/Handy It's great for me when configured to use Parakeet v3.", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"}, {"id": 782364176, "item_id": 48897761, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48897761", "by": "dinfinity", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Parakeet V3 via this tool and it is actually quite reliable for me (in English)", "excerpt": "I use Parakeet V3 via this tool and it is actually quite reliable for me (in English): https://github.com/cjpais/Handy", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"}, {"id": 782335713, "item_id": 48895982, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895982", "by": "trencedamp", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it's perfect with parakeet.", "excerpt": "Came here to post this. I use handy on my own machine and it's perfect with parakeet. If I switch to whisper it makes lots of mistakes", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "Whisper", "story": "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"}, {"id": 781186609, "item_id": 48824163, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48824163", "by": "janpmz", "date": "2026-07-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Parakeet for STT", "excerpt": "Both Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text now have local models that are good enough to get the job done. Kokoro for TTS, Parakeet for STT and Fluid-1 for text formatting (I use it with FluidVoice). I hope this is a trend that continues for other applications.", "context": "", "use_case": "local speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro"}, {"id": 779566402, "item_id": 48722900, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48722900", "by": "blopker", "date": "2026-06-29", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "This uses Parakeet + Qwen to create local transcriptions", "excerpt": "I've been working with local models for the past year. There's so many possibilities, but I don't think coding is one. Coding requires so many layers beyond inference; I spent so much time trying to replicate what Claude Code does end to end locally. Understanding all the layers and keeping up with the advancements feels like a slog. Even this article messes up and misunderstands what some of the settings are doing. ", "context": "", "use_case": "local transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development"}, {"id": 779307074, "item_id": 48706692, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48706692", "by": "d4rkp4ttern", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Near-instant accurate-enough transcription using local Parakeet V3.", "excerpt": "My current fav STT is Hex, MacOS only: https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex Near-instant accurate-enough transcription using local Parakeet V3. Handy is multi-platform, also great: https://github.com/cjpais/Handy Every time a new STT model or app is announced, I see if it displaces Hex for me but so far none have. I\u2019ll check out Yap though.", "context": "", "use_case": "local transcription model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Yap \u2013 free offline voice dictation for Mac/Windows/Linux (Wispr Flow alt)"}, {"id": 779296673, "item_id": 48706042, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48706042", "by": "taffydavid", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "you can use parakeet v3 which I find way better than whisper", "excerpt": "I love on-device transcription apps, but this looks like yet another AI generated whisper wrapper. I'm put off by the readme which is clearly LLM generated, with emdash all over the place and bits that smell of user questions turned into talking points. > Why not the Fn / key? It's the obvious one-finger choice, but on macOS the Fn key emits no real keypress \u2014 only a hidden hardware flag \u2014 so And > macOS permissions ", "context": "", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Yap \u2013 free offline voice dictation for Mac/Windows/Linux (Wispr Flow alt)"}, {"id": 777394448, "item_id": 48587153, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587153", "by": "rob", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "was completely surprised at just how fast it was for being on-device!", "excerpt": "Yep, here's the v2 and v3: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 It's almost instant on my new M5 Max w/ 36GB of memory, but I used both with Handy on my previous 2019 Intel Mac w/ 16GB memory and was completely surprised at just how fast it was for being on-device! Not instant, but only a couple seconds.", "context": "", "use_case": "on-device speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "DeepSeek Introduces Vision"}, {"id": 777387488, "item_id": 48586718, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586718", "by": "rafaelm", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use it too in Handy, for English and Spanish transcriptions", "excerpt": "I believe this is the correct link. I use it too in Handy, for English and Spanish transcriptions: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3", "context": "", "use_case": "English and Spanish transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "DeepSeek Introduces Vision"}, {"id": 776614849, "item_id": 48538428, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48538428", "by": "properbrew", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It utilises nvidia Parakeet as the ASR model", "excerpt": "Not the Whistle Enterprise software, however I had a friend with a similar requirement so I built Whistle Subtitles, you can download it from: Linux - https://downloads.blazingbanana.com/whistle-subtitles/unstable/linux/x86_64/WhistleSubtitles-unstable.deb Windows - https://downloads.blazingbanana.com/whistle-subtitles/unstable/windows/x86_64/WhistleSubtitles-unstable-setup.exe Mac - https://downloads.blazingbanana.c", "context": "", "use_case": "speech recognition", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"}, {"id": 776574915, "item_id": 48535932, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48535932", "by": "AG342", "date": "2026-06-14", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "we use FluidAudio with the Parakeet-TDT 0.6b v3 model for transcription", "excerpt": "Crash recovery is definitely something that I want to spend a bit more time on. I'm not entirely sure how Trace handles crashing right in the middle of a recording, so I'm going to put a bit of time aside in the next few days to properly explore this and see if I can come up with an elegant solution to it. I think I've got the other two bits covered. I pushed an update yesterday that adds active echo cancellation so ", "context": "", "use_case": "fast transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 775727202, "item_id": 48482950, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48482950", "by": "telenardo", "date": "2026-06-10", "stance": "compare", "quote": "benchmark it against the leading open models (Qwen3\u2011ASR, NVIDIA Parakeet V3, etc).", "excerpt": "I tried to benchmark Google\u2019s new on-device dictation app (Eloquent) and basically couldn\u2019t. It drops about half of my dictations. Background: Google shipped a new fully\u2011local dictation app yesterday with proprietary new models, so I was excited to benchmark it against the leading open models (Qwen3\u2011ASR, NVIDIA Parakeet V3, etc). I have a harness that drives a dictation app by playing an audio file through a virtual ", "context": "builds a competing local dictation app", "use_case": "speech recognition", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tried to benchmark Google's new on-device dictation model and basically couldn't"}, {"id": 774658404, "item_id": 48416150, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416150", "by": "Charlieholtz", "date": "2026-06-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Spokenly (with Parakeet as the model ) for local speech-to-text", "excerpt": "I'm biased (I'm the creator) but I use Conductor every day. I've recently switched to Opus 4.8 (fast mode always on) as my default model but swap in GPT-5.5 quite a bit for reviewing Opus's work. My flow is something like: - Create a new workspace for a specific bug/feature - Ramble into the input box. I use a goose neck microphone and Spokenly (with Parakeet as the model ) for local speech-to-text - Hit enter! I don", "context": "creator of Conductor", "use_case": "speech-to-text model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)"}, {"id": 767173633, "item_id": 47948352, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47948352", "by": "d4rkp4ttern", "date": "2026-04-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "STT with Parakeet-V3 via Hex [1] app for near-instant good-enough transcription", "excerpt": "This was on HN 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45114245 Every time a STT/TTS model is posted I wonder if it will change my current workflow on MacOS, which is: STT with Parakeet-V3 via Hex [1] app for near-instant good-enough transcription for talking to AI agents. TTS using KyutAI\u2019s Pocket-TTS, an amazing 100M-param model. I used this to make a \"voice\" plugin [2] for Claude Code So far I haven\u2019t s", "context": "macOS user", "use_case": "speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft VibeVoice: Open-Source Frontier Voice AI"}, {"id": 754876034, "item_id": 47179752, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47179752", "by": "d4rkp4ttern", "date": "2026-02-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "faster transcription than Hex (with \nParakeet V3)", "excerpt": "For MacOS I haven\u2019t seen any STT app that has faster transcription than Hex (with Parakeet V3), which leverages Apple silicon + FluidAudio: https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex This is now my standard way to speak to coding agents. I used to use Handy but Hex is even faster. Last I checked, Handy has stuttering issues but Hex doesn\u2019t.", "context": "macOS user", "use_case": "speech recognition model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Parakeet.cpp \u2013 Parakeet ASR inference in pure C++ with Metal GPU acceleration"}, {"id": 754325136, "item_id": 47145321, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145321", "by": "Karrot_Kream", "date": "2026-02-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Parakeet V3 with Handy and it works great locally for me.", "excerpt": "According to the OpenASR Leaderboard [1], looks like Parakeet V2/V3 and Canary-Qwen (a Qwen finetune) handily beat Moonshine. All 3 models are open, but Parakeet is the smallest of the 3. I use Parakeet V3 with Handy and it works great locally for me. [1]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard", "context": "", "use_case": "local speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Moonshine Open-Weights STT models \u2013 higher accuracy than WhisperLargev3"}, {"id": 752732193, "item_id": 47045762, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045762", "by": "k9294", "date": "2026-02-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use the Parakeet fast model when working with Claude Code", "excerpt": "I'm building in the same space, Workin on https://ottex.ai - It's a free STT app, with local models and BYOK support (OpenRouter, Groq, Mistral, and more). The top feature is the per-app custom settings - you can peak different models and instructions for different apps and websites. - I use the Parakeet fast model when working with Claude Code (VS Code app). - And I use a smart one when I draft notes in Obsidian. I ", "context": "", "use_case": "fast dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Free Alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue"}, {"id": 752548577, "item_id": 47034286, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47034286", "by": "d4rkp4ttern", "date": "2026-02-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "stunningly fast, near-instant transcription", "excerpt": "It's amazing how good open-weight STT and TTS have gotten, so there's no need to subs for Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, Eleven-Labs etc. Sharing my setup in case it may be useful for others; it's especially useful when working with CLI agents like Code Code or Codex-CLI: STT: Hex [1] (open-source), with Parakeet V3 - stunningly fast, near-instant transcription. The slight accuracy drop relative to bigger models is immate", "context": "", "use_case": "speech-to-text model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why Audio Is the One Area Small Labs Are Winning"}, {"id": 747870161, "item_id": 46741885, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741885", "by": "vulkoingim", "date": "2026-01-24", "stance": "compare", "quote": "mostly using parakeet v3 on my desktop, but it tends to do a bit more errors, although it is very fast", "excerpt": "I'm using https://spokenly.app/ in local mode, which is free. Very happy with it. It supports a bunch of models, including whisper and parakeet. Right now I'm mostly using parakeet v3 on my desktop, but it tends to do a bit more errors, although it is very fast. I cycle betwen it and Distil-Whisper Large V3.5, which is a bit slower. On iOS I'm also using the same app, with the Apple Speech model, which I found out to", "context": "", "use_case": "desktop speech-to-text", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?"}, {"id": 746162753, "item_id": 46635172, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46635172", "by": "peterldowns", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Parakeet v3 works great with it.", "excerpt": "Huge fan! Parakeet v3 works great with it. I have used Monologue, Superwhisper, and Aqua, at various times in the past. But Handy is at least as good, and it's not an expensive subscription. I love that it runs locally, too. Strongly recommend!", "context": "", "use_case": "speech recognition model in Handy", "switched_from": "", "story": "Handy \u2013 free open source speech-to-text app"}, {"id": 734901825, "item_id": 45931364, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45931364", "by": "lxe", "date": "2025-11-14", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I originally used Whisper and then switched to Parakeet. I much prefer whisper after playing with both.", "excerpt": "I've done something similar for Linux and Mac. I originally used Whisper and then switched to Parakeet. I much prefer whisper after playing with both. Maybe I'm not configuring Parakeet correctly, But the transcription that comes out of Whisper is usually pretty much spot on. It automatically removes all the \"ooms\" and all the \"ahs\" and it's just way more natural, in my opinion. I'm using Whisper.CPP with CUDA accele", "context": "built dictation tools for Linux and Mac", "use_case": "voice dictation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Chirp \u2013 Local Windows dictation with ParakeetV3 no executable required"}]}