Parakeet v3 beats Whisper in 15 of 25 languages in open on-device ASR test

The makers of the Yap dictation app benchmarked three on-device speech recognizers on a single M2 Pro Mac: NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3, Whisper large-v3-turbo and Apple's SpeechTranscriber in macOS 26. Parakeet had the lower word error rate in 15 of 25 European languages, Whisper in 10, and every transcript and recording hash was published.

• Parakeet v3: 4.5% WER in English, 2.5% in Italian, 4.7% in Russian
• Whisper turbo wins Greek (12.0% vs 31.7%) and Finnish (7.7% vs 10.1%)
• Parakeet beat Apple's model in all six languages it supports
• Speed: about 20x real time for Parakeet vs 13x for Whisper turbo