alt Hacker News> there are better models that are state of the art now like Nemotron and Parakeet both by Nvidia
Is parakeet state of the art? It always transcribes speech fragments for me, like if I stutter and say "m-m-m-map" parakeet will dutifully transcribe "m m m map". Which I guess could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you want. Whisper does not do that however.
I do like cohere transcribe a lot.
Replies
I use Parakeet V3 via this tool and it is actually quite reliable for me (in English): https://github.com/cjpais/Handy
No, there are better open weight models: https://artificialanalysis.ai/speech-to-text/non-streaming
Apparently MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize is quite good too as it released only a few days ago.
Agree on this point. Recent anecdotal testing I did found Whisper is still better than Parakeet.
Parakeet is certainly faster on my machine (m3 max), but I can't stand using it over Whisper for dictating my prompts. It makes a lot more mistakes, possibly because (like you mentioned) large portions of the speech will pause / stutter as I think about what to include.
With whisper v3 turbo, I can almost always live with the few mistakes because the overall stream-of-thought word-salad I provide is still clear at a high level. The bits and pieces of context seem to help, that I might leave out if typing and focused more on traditional conciseness / clean writing. With parakeet, I needed to do frequent editing even for shorter bits of speech.
I realize some applications prioritize the latency.
I think that's parakeet doing its job there. That is a closer reflection of what you've actually said. The trick is then throwing that output through some additional deterministic and non-deterministic steps to tidy it up however you prefer. It's exactly what I do with my free and open source dictation app (dictator.robgough.net) for Mac+iOS. And of course, everything stays entirely on-device. Gemma E4B is really wonderful for that second step, it's great at language – but takes up 6-7GB RAM.