Palash Debnath
3cae853440
The Model Catalogue put the same decision on two axes: an Engines pane with TTS/ASR/LLM tabs and a Models pane with TTS/ASR/Dictation/Diarisation sections, dictation shown in both, plus storage stats, the HF token and the voice-preview toggle parked on the model list. Settings → Voice still carried Engines and Models entries that only pointed back here. Now the page reads top-down: a SetupSummary (speech, transcription, dictation, language model — engine, device, one status word, Change), the engine list for one family, and that family's downloadable weights under it (TTS under TTS; offline ASR, streaming dictation and diarisation under ASR; nothing for LLM, whose engines bring their own). One storage line points at Settings → Storage. - ModelStoreTab takes a `family` and scopes sections and the recommendation preset to it (scopeReco); stats strip, HF-token toolbar and previews panel removed from it. - Settings: Engines/Models categories and CataloguePointer removed; models directory → Storage, HF mirror → Network (both restart-flagged), voice previews → Storage. "Manage models" in disk usage opens the catalogue. - Store: openCatalogue takes a family (pane key tolerated, ignored); pendingCatalogueTab gone. - Engine matrix title is now the locale's plain "Engines". - i18n: catalogue.* summary keys in all 21 locales; pane/pointer keys dropped. - Docs: "Model Catalogue → Engines" is "Model Catalogue"; "→ Models" is "→ Downloaded weights".
2.5 KiB
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, 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 → Downloaded weights — 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.