Parakeet V2 on Apple Silicon

Parakeet V2,
on your Apple Neural Engine.

NVIDIA's Parakeet V2 model is one of the fastest English ASR models on the planet. The FluidAudio team ported it to the Apple Neural Engine. Neuron Flame ships it bundled, set as the default, ready to go in 60 seconds.

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Free · Open source · GPL-3.0 · 100% on-device by default

Why Parakeet beats Whisper for English on Mac

Parakeet V2 (default)Whisper Large v3
LanguagesEnglish only100+
HardwareApple Neural EngineGPU (Metal)
Speed (M2)~7× faster than realtime~2× faster than realtime
Accuracy (English)Within 1% WER of Whisper LargeBest in class
Size on disk474 MB1.6 GB

What ships in Neuron Flame

When to switch off Parakeet

Parakeet V2 is English-only. If you dictate in any other language, switch to a Whisper variant on the AI Models tab — same UI, same workflow. You can keep both installed and toggle between them per-language need.

What if you don't have Apple Silicon?

Parakeet via FluidAudio runs on Apple Silicon Macs. On Intel Macs, Neuron Flame falls back to Whisper variants. The whole UX is identical; you just won't get Parakeet's speed advantage.

The credit

Parakeet was made by NVIDIA. The Apple Silicon port is by the FluidAudio team — open source on GitHub. Neuron Flame just provides the UX wrapper. Both projects deserve more attention than they currently get.

The fastest local English transcription on Mac.

Free, ANE-optimised, default in Neuron Flame.

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FAQ

Common questions.

Does Parakeet V2 work on Intel Macs?

FluidAudio's Parakeet V2 implementation targets the Apple Neural Engine, which is Apple Silicon only. On Intel Macs, Neuron Flame falls back to Whisper variants. Functionally identical UX, just no ANE acceleration.

Will my dictation be less accurate than Whisper?

For clear English speech, Parakeet V2 is within ~1% word-error-rate of Whisper Large v3 — essentially indistinguishable in practice. For very noisy audio, heavy accents, or technical jargon, Whisper Large is still the more accurate choice.

Can I run Parakeet on my own without Neuron Flame?

Absolutely — FluidAudio is an open-source library you can integrate into your own Swift app. Neuron Flame just packages it with a UI, recorder, dictionary, and AI enhancement layer.

Why is Parakeet English-only?

It was trained primarily on English speech and works best on what it knows. NVIDIA has multilingual variants (Parakeet RNN-T XL etc.) that the FluidAudio team may port in future.