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VoiceStudio — Parakeet TDT v3 (MLX) Engine

NVIDIA's Parakeet TDT v3 on the Apple Silicon GPU, via the small pure-Python parakeet-mlx package. It gives Macs the Parakeet tier CUDA/CPU users get through NeMo or sherpa-onnx: 25 European languages, word timestamps from the TDT decoder itself (no wav2vec2 alignment pass needed), ~1.2 GB download, ~2 GB unified memory, dictation-grade speed on the GPU.

Unlike nemo-parakeet it needs no nemo_toolkit (whose transformers pin conflicts with the app's) — it is installed by default on Apple Silicon source installs since 0.3.22.

Selecting it

  • Model Catalogue → Engines, ASR tab → Use on the Parakeet TDT v3 (MLX) row, or OMNIVOICE_ASR_BACKEND=parakeet-mlx.
  • Dictation prefers it automatically: once the model weights are installed (Model Catalogue → Models — the auto-pick never triggers a download), live dictation/capture uses it whenever your system language is one of the 25 covered European languages. Other languages keep the multilingual Whisper engine, so dictation coverage never regresses.

Best at

  • Live dictation on a Mac — TDT decoding is fast enough for the capture path, at Parakeet's better-than-Whisper English WER.
  • European-language transcription with word timestamps at a fraction of whisper-large-v3's memory and compute.

For languages outside the 25 (CJK, Arabic, ...), use mlx-whisper instead.

Platform support

Apple Silicon only — the same shared MLX platform gate as mlx-whisper refuses Linux, Windows, and Intel Macs before any import (#390). It runs on the unified-memory GPU; there is no CPU tier.

Model selection

ASR_MODEL_PARAKEET_MLX — default mlx-community/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3. Weights download on first load — see downloading-models.

Quirks

  • Long files are processed in 120 s chunks internally to bound unified-memory use; short dictation buffers and dub chunks are unaffected.
  • Parakeet v3 auto-detects among its 25 languages but doesn't expose the pick, so the reported language is the one you requested (or none) — it is never hardcoded to English.
  • Word timestamps are merged from the decoder's subword tokens — good for subtitles and dictation; for lip-sync-critical dubbing the wav2vec2-aligned engines (mlx-whisper, whisperx) remain the accuracy tier.

Speed comparisons across engines live in performance.