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Fact · Accessibility and health

8.00percent 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 8.00 percent on 42 Italian readings of a short passage by 21 healthy speakers aged 60 to 77.

Measured by us on October 23, 2026, from 42 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. The speakers read a printed text aloud in a quiet room with a microphone 15 to 25 cm away (Italian Parkinson's Voice and Speech, University of Bari and ASL Bari, recorded 2016 and 2017). The reference is the text they were given, so a word a speaker skipped or changed counts as an error for every engine alike.
How it is measured
Word error rate = 433 word errors / 5,410 reference words = 8.00 percent, over 42 recordings (46.7 minutes of audio). The 95% interval over speakers is 6.06 to 10.31 percent.
What it does not show
Against healthy speakers aged 19 to 29 reading the same text, this is +6.21 points; the 95% interval for that difference, allowing for the test's 9 comparisons, is +3.40 to +9.63 points, which excludes zero, so this is a measured difference. 21 speakers from one region of Italy, in one language, reading a fixed text: a person dictating their own words, in another language or with more advanced Parkinson's may fare differently. Half of these speakers had an error rate of 7.8 percent or less, the highest was 20.9 percent.

In the data

A row of Dictation Accuracy With Parkinson's Speech, Tested, as Parakeet TDT v3, Healthy speakers aged 60 to 77, read passage: 6.06 to 10.31 percent.

Engine
Parakeet TDT v3
Maker
NVIDIA
Speakers
Healthy speakers aged 60 to 77
What they read
Read passage
Speakers in group
21
Recordings
42
Language
Italian

Used to calculate

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