Palash DebnathandClaude Fable 5
030d5ea01f
* docs(engines): a guide for every engine + index; fix two engine-metadata bugs 21 new pages under docs/engines/ (10 TTS, 10 ASR, index README) — every registered engine now has one: what it's for, platform support, model env vars, quirks with issue refs. Linked from both READMEs' engine sections. Code fixes found while verifying facts against the registries: - KittenTTS docstring claimed default voice 'Jasper'; the code default is expr-voice-2-f - the isolated-ASR sidecar read only ASR_MODEL_FW while the download preflight read ASR_MODEL_FASTER — set one and the other quietly used a different model; both now resolve ASR_MODEL_FW-override → ASR_MODEL_FASTER - moonshine's install hint named 'useful-moonshine', a package the backend never imports; now moonshine-onnx / moonshine-voice Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs(changelog): entries for the engine guides + sidecar model fix (#1556) Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs(engines): second-harvest fixes — TLS guidance, matrix/code alignment, CN counts - README matrix aligned to gpu_compat (the code is the source of truth): CosyVoice macOS is CPU not MPS, IndexTTS and GGUF gain their real CUDA/CPU/MPS cells - gpt-sovits guide: prefer https/tunnel for non-loopback servers, plaintext warning; first-use download guidance on both OmniVoice pages - preflight empty-env fallback matches the sidecar (ASR_MODEL_FASTER='' no longer resolves a different repo) - nano installs via uv pip; kitten log level wording; index links install guides incl. the Gatekeeper step; README_CN engine counts 16/11 Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs(readme-cn): the all-engines-local claim now excludes the remote client Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> --------- Co-authored-by: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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VoiceStudio — Parakeet TDT v3 (MLX) Engine
NVIDIA's Parakeet TDT v3 on the Apple Silicon GPU, via the small pure-Python
parakeet-mlx package. It gives Macs the Parakeet tier CUDA/CPU users get
through NeMo or sherpa-onnx: 25 European languages, word timestamps from
the TDT decoder itself (no wav2vec2 alignment pass needed), ~1.2 GB download,
~2 GB unified memory, dictation-grade speed on the GPU.
Unlike nemo-parakeet it needs no nemo_toolkit (whose
transformers pin conflicts with the app's) — it is installed by default on
Apple Silicon source installs since 0.3.22.
Selecting it
- Model Catalogue → Engines, ASR tab → Use on the Parakeet TDT v3
(MLX) row, or
OMNIVOICE_ASR_BACKEND=parakeet-mlx. - Dictation prefers it automatically: once the model weights are installed (Model Catalogue → Models — the auto-pick never triggers a download), live dictation/capture uses it whenever your system language is one of the 25 covered European languages. Other languages keep the multilingual Whisper engine, so dictation coverage never regresses.
Best at
- Live dictation on a Mac — TDT decoding is fast enough for the capture path, at Parakeet's better-than-Whisper English WER.
- European-language transcription with word timestamps at a fraction of whisper-large-v3's memory and compute.
For languages outside the 25 (CJK, Arabic, ...), use mlx-whisper instead.
Platform support
Apple Silicon only — the same shared MLX platform gate as mlx-whisper refuses Linux, Windows, and Intel Macs before any import (#390). It runs on the unified-memory GPU; there is no CPU tier.
Model selection
ASR_MODEL_PARAKEET_MLX — default mlx-community/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3.
Weights download on first load — see
downloading-models.
Quirks
- Long files are processed in 120 s chunks internally to bound unified-memory use; short dictation buffers and dub chunks are unaffected.
- Parakeet v3 auto-detects among its 25 languages but doesn't expose the pick, so the reported language is the one you requested (or none) — it is never hardcoded to English.
- Word timestamps are merged from the decoder's subword tokens — good for subtitles and dictation; for lip-sync-critical dubbing the wav2vec2-aligned engines (mlx-whisper, whisperx) remain the accuracy tier.
Speed comparisons across engines live in performance.