v0.6 · WhisperKit · Optional, On-Device
Speak any of 98 languages.
Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Vietnamese, Thai — and 91 others. All on your Mac. All free.
Pick yours.
A sample of the 98 supported languages.
Plus 74 more — including everything Parakeet covers.
Two engines, one app.
Parakeet for speed. WhisperKit for everything else.
Parakeet
The default engine. Fastest local STT on Apple Silicon, sharpest on English.
- ▸ 25 European languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian
- ▸ 155× realtime on Apple Silicon
- ▸ ~2.5% word error rate
- ▸ ~465 MB per selected Parakeet build, downloaded during setup
WhisperKit
One-time download adds 73 more languages. Slower than Parakeet for English — but covers far more of the world.
- ▸ 98 languages including all of Parakeet's
- ▸ Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Vietnamese, Thai, and 73 more
- ▸ 632 MB one-time download
- ▸ Switch in Settings or pick per-call from the CLI
How to switch engines
Two clicks in Settings. Optional CLI override per call.
Open Settings
Settings → Speech Recognition. Two engines, one toggle.
Pick an engine
WhisperKit downloads its model the first time (632 MB, one-time). Then everything stays on your Mac.
Pick a language
For WhisperKit, pick a default — or leave it on Auto to detect.
Power users: override the engine or language per call from the CLI.
$ macparakeet-cli transcribe meeting.m4a \
--engine whisper --language ko --format jsonMore languages. Same promise.
WhisperKit changes the engine, not the principle. Your audio still never leaves your Mac. No cloud APIs, no transcripts shipped to OpenAI, no telemetry on what you said.
Questions & answers
Why isn't WhisperKit the default?
Speed. Parakeet is faster on Apple Silicon and sharper on English. WhisperKit is the right choice when you need its languages — but for English speakers, Parakeet gets you to text first.
Do I need both engines?
No. Pick whichever fits. Parakeet is enough if you only speak its 25 languages. WhisperKit alone is enough if you want everything in one engine.
Is my audio still on-device with WhisperKit?
Yes. WhisperKit is OpenAI's Whisper Large v3 Turbo, ported to CoreML by Argmax. It runs entirely on your Mac. No audio leaves your device.
How accurate is WhisperKit on my language?
It varies by language. WhisperKit tracks Whisper's published benchmarks — strong on European languages and Mandarin, solid on Japanese and Korean, weaker on low-resource languages. Try it on a 30-second clip before you commit.
Can I download smaller or larger Whisper models?
The default is large-v3-turbo (632 MB) — the best size/quality trade-off on Apple Silicon. Other Whisper variants are technically supported but not exposed in v0.6's UI.
Does dictation work in non-English languages?
Yes — both engines support dictation. Whichever engine you've selected in Settings is what dictation uses. Clean text post-processing (filler removal, snippets) is currently optimized for English.
Will Parakeet add more languages?
Likely. Parakeet TDT is actively maintained by NVIDIA's research team — its v3 release added 25 European languages. New ones get picked up as they ship. WhisperKit covers the gap until then.
Try it in your language.
Free and open-source. Download MacParakeet, switch the engine in Settings, speak.
macOS 14.2+ · Apple Silicon · GPL-3.0