Parakeet vs Whisper: Picking a Phone ASR Model
Daniel wants dictation-first speech-to-text running entirely on his phone, and after two years of trying, Whisper still isn't it. NVIDIA's Parakeet family keeps winning — and surprisingly, the English-only v2 beats the multilingual v3. This episode unpacks the three dials that actually matter when running ASR on a phone (version, size, and quantization), why streaming models fall apart on multi-minute dictation, and why there's essentially no Android tooling for benchmarking on-device inference. We also evaluate Daniel's proposed hour-long benchmark plan and where it holds up. Episode 5456 —…
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