GigaAM Russian Speech-to-Text on Mac: A 2026 Guide
GigaAM is one of the strongest open-weight speech models for Russian. If you're looking for offline Russian dictation on a Mac, GigaAM is going to come up — and it's worth knowing what the model is, what it does well, and what we ship in Resonant for Russian instead.
What GigaAM is
GigaAM (Giga Acoustic Model) is an open-weight Russian ASR model released by SaluteSpeech, the speech team at Sber. The v2 release weighs in at roughly 231 MB — small enough to download quickly and run on consumer hardware — and posts state-of-the-art numbers on Russian benchmarks, beating prior Whisper-based and wav2vec-based Russian models by a meaningful margin.
It was trained primarily on Russian speech data and is released under a commercially-permissive license, which makes it a popular choice for Russian-language products and self-hosted transcription pipelines.
Where GigaAM is the right choice
If you're building a Russian-first product or running Russian transcription as a batch job — meeting recordings, podcast captions, an in-house transcription tool — GigaAM is hard to beat for an open-weight model. The package is small, the accuracy is high, and the license lets you ship it.
Why Resonant ships Qwen3 ASR for Russian
Resonant is real-time dictation on Mac, not a Russian transcription product. Most of the people who dictate in Russian also dictate in English — sometimes in the same sentence — and they want one model that handles both without a settings flip.
We ship Alibaba's Qwen3 ASR 0.6B for multilingual dictation, including Russian. It covers 30+ languages, handles code-switching as a first-class case, and is compiled to CoreML to run on Apple Neural Engine with low latency. For dedicated Russian benchmarks GigaAM still has the edge, but Qwen3 ASR's Russian accuracy is strong, and the multilingual fluency is what makes it the right choice for live dictation.
Read more about Qwen3 ASR in Resonant.
The short version
GigaAM is the model to use if your workflow is Russian-only and you're building or self-hosting. For live dictation across Russian, English, and whatever else — Resonant ships Qwen3 ASR on Apple Neural Engine, fully on-device, no cloud.
Download Resonant to try Russian dictation on your Mac.