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Fact · Speech recognition

2.70percent word error rate

In our October 2026 test on a Mac with an M2 Pro, Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 had a word error rate of 2.70 percent on 84 English readings of 3 to 4 minutes by 40 speakers, handed over as one recording of 3 to 4 minutes.

Measured by us on October 25, 2026, from recordings

Our own measurement

This number comes from our benchmark, not from another publication. The full record (the setup, every recording's checksum, every transcript and timing) is published, so you can recompute it.

What it measures
NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 converted to Core ML (Parakeet Ultra, FluidInference, model revision 95eaa59a39d4), run through FluidAudio 0.17.4 on the CPU and GPU, with the language given. This is the engine the Yap app uses on Mac. 84 examples of 3 to 4 minutes read by 40 speakers from public-domain audiobooks (LibriSpeech-Long test-clean, Google DeepMind, from LibriSpeech), clean recordings of read English. In the pieces condition the same audio was cut at pauses into pieces of 10 to 20 seconds, as someone dictating in short bursts would, and the pieces' text was joined.
How it is measured
Word error rate = 1,437 word errors / 53,292 reference words = 2.70 percent, over 5.45 hours of audio. 95% interval over speakers: 2.36 to 3.06 percent. Left-out words: 0.48 percent of the reference; examples that lost a passage of 10 or more words in a row: 1 of 84.
What it does not show
The same audio in pieces gave 2.45 percent; the difference (one recording minus pieces) is +0.25 points, with a 95% interval allowing for the test's 3 such comparisons of +0.02 to +0.49 points, which excludes zero, so it is a measured difference. Audiobook reading in a quiet room is easier than dictating your own words at a desk, and an app may cut or stream audio in its own way; the test isolates what the length of one recording costs each engine.

In the data

A row of Dictation Accuracy on Long Recordings, Tested, as Parakeet TDT v3, in one recording: 2.36 to 3.06 percent.

Engine
Parakeet TDT v3
Maker
NVIDIA
How the speech was handed over
One recording of about 4 minutes
Readings
84
Speakers
40
Language
English

Used to calculate