Parakeet Unified EN 0.6B model in Handy is great
Recently, a new model called Parakeet Unified EN 0.6B appeared in the Handy app. When I wrote about finding the best local speech-to-text app, I was using Parakeet v3, which was already great. But this new Unified EN 0.6B model is on another level.
It is significantly faster and much more accurate than the earlier models. The latency drop is immediately noticeable, and words appear almost instantly as you speak, with virtually zero delay. I am running it on an M2 MacBook Air with 16 GB RAM, and it works flawlessly without slowing down the system.
Punctuation, capitalization, and technical terms are also handled much better. Plus, at around 600 MB in size, it's easily the sweet spot for offline dictation on Mac.
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