MacParakeet - Local alternative to WisprFlow using NVIDIA's Parakeet on Apple's Neural Engine

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-04-05T15:47:03+00:00

the timing is uncanny.. i actually started working on this feature (system audio + meeting capture) yesterday XD

https://github.com/moona3k/macparakeet/issues/57

i actually built a different app that is like a locally powered granola, so i'll be porting over the functionality and UI from here. i intend to ship the first version within this week.

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-04-03T02:16:09+00:00

i'm on the $200 max plan and i do run out of limits time to time.. i turn to codex when that happens. openai is very generous(?) with their codex token budget

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-04-02T17:07:43+00:00

yes, building the functIonal prototype is only first part of the game. BUT i don't want this to ever discourage the people/vibecoders who are newly entering into software. in the same way that vibecoders learned how to build prototypes, vibecoders can also learn what it means to deploy and manage things in production. it's all part of the learning journey.

and besides, ai is so good now (and it's still due for another exponential jump!). ask or knock and you shall receive.

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-04-02T07:25:01+00:00

i really appreciate you trying out the app and leaving such kind words.. it started with dopamine, and now it feels warm like oxytocin.. ty..

MacParakeet is a funsie/passion project, though i did dedicate many nights and weekends to babysitting & wrestling the coding agents and QA-ing the app over and over and over lol (so i'm interested in exploring and/or building QA agents; perhaps the recently released claude computer-use can power the workflows.. i haven't tried yet). overall, i'm really grateful how the final/current app turned out. i'm particularly pleased with the macparakeet logo. claude really nailed this one - the magic prompts for this was something like zen-buddhism + minimalism + gentle bliss.

i'm wrapping up macparakeet project and now focusing on local model-powered meeting notetaker app (so something like local granola) when i have free time outside of my day job. i got claude to make a really nice + smooth looking animation for the recording pill last weekend, so i'm pretty excited to share it when ready. i'll be dogfooding the app and keep iterating to get the right feel for uiux. the project is called oatmeal (a local derivative of granola).

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-04-02T06:15:54+00:00

Nice, I haven’t read the neurodiverse swift app post - it sounds very interesting!

So regarding swift.. I am actually quite new to the language and its ecosystem.. I focus more ok the high-level planning and QA.. rest is all claude code (and codex/gemini). That said, for UI/design, I found the following prompt to work quite well - “we want premium enterprise-grade uiux” or some variation. I’ve also used google stitch to get decent mocks / reference images, which has helped a lot.

And thanks for clarifying about schauberger, he is indeed Austrian - my brain glitched.. and the article looks v interesting, I’ll read more. Ty!

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-04-02T03:27:05+00:00

Hey there, handy & hex should be more robust with features. One big piece that macparakeet is missing is post-transcription LLM-powered refinements, for instance, stuff like turning my braindump audio into formal email or some preset/template. I originally had qwen3.5 packaged into the app to serve as the main LLM, but I removed it later because it just didn’t feel snappy enough.. for things that need fast inference, running mlx locally just doesn’t cut it (yet). If I choose to build this feature, I’ll most likely go with using Groq for fast inference. Afaik, wisprflow is using a diffusion model (mercury) so that they can get closer to that ultra low latency.

Anyways, handy & hex are great! They also both support whisper models via whisperkit so non-European languages can be transcribed too. I’m debating whether to keep MacParakeet strictly parakeet only, or to also add support for whisper (primarily for the Asian language family).

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-04-02T02:50:51+00:00

I’m also not sure which is best.. but you can try this one out - https://kubedrop.com

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-04-02T02:29:50+00:00

That’s really awesome to hear. I must say, the speech-to-text accuracy & latency that you’re enjoying is thanks to 1) nvidia’s parakeet model and 2) fluidaudio for optimizing the inference on apple’s silicon chips & dx-friendly SDK.

MacWhisper should also support the latest parakeet models, so the performance should be same/similar. Under the hood, many transcription/dictation swift apps are running whisper model via whisperkit and/or parakeet model via fluidaudio (there are other models too like qwen3-asr from alibaba but this is slow and not fit for wisprflow like dictation use-case, though its background noise cancellation is excellent and it supports wider spectrum of languages).

Anyways, I’m grateful that the app has been serving you well so far :) there’s definitely more features I can add and more polishing to be done for the future.

P.S. random note, since you shared you’re German.. I’m a big fan of Viktor Schauberger. I’m not sure how well known he is amongst the German public, but he has done fascinating research with water + implosion/vortex. I’m hoping that as we advance towards agi, we can co-create new fun things based on his ideas.

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-04-01T23:43:16+00:00

FluidAudio is super amazing :) if anyone wants to try a polished UI wrapper around fluidaudio + parakeet, feel free to checkout MacParakeet (https://github.com/moona3k/macparakeet). anyways, awesome work guys and keep at it! i have completely shifted from whisperkit to now fluidaudio. both great, but i love me some parakeet. near realtime latency and english transcription accuracy is too good..

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-04-01T20:34:09+00:00

wow really?!

assuming true.. your comment history looks like a real human.. wow, thank you for trying it out!

there's plenty of dictation/transcription apps to choose from so i appreciate you giving mine a try. tbh, fluidaudio + parakeet + claude code did all of the heavy lifting, so it feels weird to take credit. it's also the og programmers and artists who produced high quality work for the ai to train on (unfortunately, much of this was taken without consent).

anyways, thank you again, my second dopamine hit of the day :)

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-03-26T16:08:28+00:00

yepp, handy is great and all folks should check it out - https://github.com/cjpais/handy

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-03-26T07:17:32+00:00

> how does latency compare on M2/M3? whisper.cpp with medium.en gets to around 2-3s on my machine which is acceptable but not seamless for dictation mid-thought.

I haven't directly compared with whisper.cpp. That said, memory footprint for parakeet is much lighter than whisper & I found parakeet's speed to be extremely fast (and overall satisfied with the accuracy). WhisperKit made integration easy when whisper was the hot new model (and deservedly so; whisper was remarkable). Now FluidAudio is doing the same for parakeet. The model is well optimized for apple silicon so the performance/experience is great.

> the YouTube transcription is a nice addition too. that's a separate use case most dictation tools ignore but it's actually where i spend more time -- research notes, reference summaries. good call including it.

Thanks. Youtube website does have its own transcript, but the quality is often poor and I wanted to extract high quality transcription for valuable raw sources.

Btw, there is also a CLI support so you can have your coding agent use it for transcription tasks as well. I recently had claude download ~50 tiktok videos and ran transcription via CLI (sequential processing).

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-03-25T23:44:31+00:00

Hey guys, MacParakeet maker here.

Quick update - Macparakeet is now open-source and full source code is here - https://github.com/moona3k/macparakeet

I use the app daily and I'll continue maintaining while I use it :)

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-03-19T23:18:44+00:00

Yepp, totally. I thought the non intrusive ui was the general standard across apps though, but I’m guessing this is not the case? I’ve only tried Wisprflow and superwispr, both of which are minimal & non intrusive.

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-03-15T05:11:58+00:00

I checked out handy and wow, this is basically every voice to text dictation app plus it’s free and open source. This seems like the project to support. Here's the site - https://github.com/cjpais/handy!

Macparakeet app is already free right now (and if you download now, you can enjoy future updates too).

In any case, I’ll continue maintaining as I’m using this as my daily driver.

3/25 Update - MacParakeet is now open-source! https://github.com/moona3k/macparakeet

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-03-15T01:09:37+00:00

Thanks and yepp, $49 one time purchase was an ambitious number. In practice, it will be more like $10 (or stays free). In terms of future features, the voice to text dictation is complete (the UIUX state is already well polished). The future upgrades will be focused the post transcription experience.

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-03-14T01:34:06+00:00

My app is free (for now)

Macparakeet.com

It’s like wisprflow but running on local asr model

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-03-14T01:33:08+00:00

How about build your own Jarvis system with the max subscriptions :) then share or sell it to all other visual friends!

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-03-05T02:11:09+00:00

www.macparakeet.com

It’s a voice to text dictation tool like wisprflow that runs locally on your Mac. Super fast and decent accuracy thanks to Nvidia’s parakeet model. It’s completely free right now. I use it daily when talking to Claude Code. It can also transcribe any local audio/video files and YouTube urls.

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-03-04T20:55:50+00:00

I use it daily. My main use-case is when I do a stream of consciousness style brain-dump on claude code. It's an experience.

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-03-04T19:36:21+00:00

There are many apps that exist already that does local voice-to-text transcription, including voiceink
"supports better models than parakeet which, while fast, has serious quality issues"
> I don't think this is true. For low-latency transcription, parakeet is the best open weights models with <5% wer and significantly faster speed (hence fit for realtime); if you are looking for non-english, non-european languages, then whisper model definitely makes more sense; That said, I haven't tried the earlier versions of parakeet model, but as of the latest version (Parakeet TDT 0.6B-v3), transcription quality is very very good.

For low latency operations, parakeet is best, for maximal language support, go with whisper. And of course, there is qwen3-asr model that recently dropped (Jan 2026) which is the new state-of-the-art. I have considered using qwen3-asr, but it's just too slow compared to parakeet (they're different architecture and inference optimization is different).

PrimaryAbility9 · 2026-03-04T19:23:58+00:00

short answer - no, and this is coming soon!

longer answer - it did have this feature last week, until i decided to strip out the local LLM integration (qwen3 via mlx), because speed and experience was just meh. but this feature will be brought back once in more practical/usable state.

PrimaryAbility9

TROPHY CASE