Parakeet TDT: The Best Offline Dictation Model for English and European Languages
When you install Resonant, the first model you get is Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3. That's not an accident. It's the most accurate locally-runnable speech-to-text model for English and European languages — and it runs entirely on your Mac, with no internet connection and no data leaving your machine.
What Parakeet TDT actually is
Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 was built by NVIDIA on their NeMo FastConformer TDT (Token-and-Duration Transducer) architecture. It was trained on over 660,000 hours of audio — one of the largest training runs for any publicly available offline ASR model. The result is a model that handles natural speech robustly: background noise, different accents, mixed terminology, fast talkers.
The numbers are compelling. On FLEURS benchmarks:
- English: among the lowest WER of any local model
- German: 5.04% word error rate
- Spanish: 3.45% word error rate
- Italian: 3.00% word error rate
- French: competitive with cloud-based offerings
It auto-detects language across 25 European languages. You don't need to configure anything — switch between English and German mid-session and it follows.
Hotwords: the feature that makes it professional-grade
Parakeet supports hotword biasing, which means you can tell the model to weight specific terms more heavily. This is the feature that makes it work well for specialized work.
If you dictate medical notes and always say “metformin” or “HbA1c”, those go in your hotwords list and the model stops second-guessing them. If you work in engineering and say “Kubernetes” or “OAuth” frequently, same principle. If you dictate correspondence that includes client names, names that might otherwise get phonetically mangled, hotwords lock them in.
This works because of how Parakeet's transducer architecture handles decoding: it uses modified beam search with NeMo's BPE vocabulary, which allows context biasing without retraining the whole model. Resonant manages all of this automatically — you just add terms in Settings.
Who should use Parakeet
If you speak English as your primary dictation language and want the best possible accuracy, Parakeet is the right model. Full stop.
It's also the right choice for anyone who works in English but occasionally dictates in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, or any of the other 20+ European languages it covers. The auto-detection means switching contexts costs nothing.
At 640 MB, the download is mid-sized. It won't fill your drive, and on Apple Silicon it loads fast. If storage is a hard constraint, Moonshine v2 Medium covers English at 200 MB. But for most people, Parakeet is where you stay.
How to use it in Resonant
Parakeet is already selected by default when you install Resonant. If you've previously switched to a different model, go to Settings → Transcription and select “Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3” from the model list.
To add hotwords, go to Settings → Transcription → Custom Words. Enter any terms that matter to your work, one per line. The model applies them immediately — no restart required.
Everything processes on-device. Your audio, your words, your notes — none of it goes anywhere.
Download Resonant to try Parakeet on your Mac.