Whisper vs. Parakeet for Dictation
Choose by model size and speed, then try the available models with your own voice on your Mac or iPhone.
Choose Whisper for a lighter-weight model; choose Parakeet when speed matters more than its heavier footprint. On Mac, Parakeet requires macOS 14 or later. Both support multilingual speech recognition and run on your device in KeyVox after download. The best choice depends on your voice, language, surroundings, device, and priorities, so a short real-world test is more useful than a universal winner.
The practical choice
| Question | Whisper | Parakeet |
|---|---|---|
| Language need | Multilingual speech recognition | Multilingual speech recognition |
| Processing in KeyVox | On-device | On-device |
| Internet after setup | Not needed for normal dictation | Not needed for normal dictation |
| Best test | Your own language, microphone, and writing | Your own language, microphone, and writing |
Languages Each Model Supports
You do not need to pick a language in KeyVox. Speak normally, and the model you chose detects the language automatically.
| Model | Supported languages |
|---|---|
| Whisper Base (99) | Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Mongolian, Myanmar, Nepali, Norwegian, Nynorsk, Occitan, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish, and Yoruba. |
| Parakeet v3 (25) | Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian. |
Try your real workflow
Dictate the same short message with both available models in the room where you normally work. Include names and terms you use often, then compare the text you actually receive.
Personal words help too
For supported English words and names, KeyVox’s personal dictionary can improve the everyday experience by applying saved entries during final cleanup. The app does not define an entry or character capacity limit.
Questions people ask
Do Whisper and Parakeet work offline in KeyVox?
Yes. Both downloaded model choices perform normal transcription on the device.
Choose the local model that fits you.
Download KeyVox and try Whisper or, on supported devices, Parakeet.
No KeyVox account. Dictation has no recurring subscription.