I confirm this as my experience as well. Parakeet did not perform well for me (English with heavy accent). Whisper large is much better. But once we get to model of this size look at qwen3-asr (1.7b parameters). I'm quite happy with how it performs (both transcription quality and speed on rtx5080). By the way the model is also available on openrouter and very/very cheap. Performance is reasonable (<1s response), but some requests are delayed (>10s)