As a heavy user of MacWhisper (for dictation), I'm looking forward to better speech-to-text models. MacWhisper with Whisper Large v3 Turbo model works fine, but latency adds up quickly, especially if you use online LLMs for post-processing (and it really improves things a lot).
MacWhisper supports 10x faster models with the same accuracy like Parakeet v2 (they were the first to do it 6-9 months ago). Have you tried those?
Not sure if this will help but I've set up Handy [1] with Parakeet V2 for STT and gpt-oss-120b on Cerebras [2] for post-processing and I'm happy with the performance of this setup!
[1] https://handy.computer/ [2] https://www.cerebras.ai/
parakeet v3 is also nice, and better for most languages.
The latest build of Handy actually supports Parakeet V3 (among other models) under the covers. Agreed that it's a very solid multilingual model.
https://github.com/cjpais/Handy
If you haven't already, give the models that Handy supports a try. They're not Whisper-large quality, but some of them are very fast.
the parakeet TDT models that are coreml optimized by fluid audio are hands down the fastest local models i’ve tried— worth checking out!
(unloading to the NPU is where the edge is)
https://huggingface.co/FluidInference/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2-c...
https://github.com/FluidInference/FluidAudio
The devs are responsive and active and nice on their discord too. You’ll find discussions on all the latest whizbangs with VAD, TTS, EOU etc
Handy with parakeet v2 is excellent