Which MacWhisper model is best?

Whisper Large v3 Turbo is the best default model in MacWhisper on a Mac with an M-series chip. It is the most accurate of the common options on clean English, and it supports the widest range of languages. Parakeet v3 is the better pick when the audio is noisy, the speakers have varied accents, or the file is hours long. These conclusions come from our own tests of the same engines MacWhisper runs, on a Mac with an M2 Pro with nothing sent over the network. The full model discussion is in our MacWhisper guide.

Turbo wins on clean English

We measure accuracy as word error rate, the share of words wrong. On 100 clean English recordings, Whisper Large v3 Turbo made 3.92 percent errors ¹, Parakeet TDT v3 made 4.48 percent ² and Apple's on-device model 6.73 percent ³. The gap between the first two is small.

Turbo is OpenAI's slimmed-down Large v3, with 4 decoder layers instead of 32 ⁴, and it runs about 8 times faster than the large model ⁵. MacWhisper reaches over 100 languages ⁶, while Parakeet v3 covers 25 European languages ⁷. Outside Europe, Whisper is the choice.

Parakeet wins when audio is hard

On English conversations from 13 accent groups, Parakeet's error rate was 12.57 percent, against 17.66 percent for Whisper ^{8 9}. With talk in the background 5 dB quieter than the speaker, Whisper's errors rose to 13.92 percent ¹⁰ while Parakeet's rose to 7.85 percent ¹¹.

Long files favor Parakeet as well. Whisper is trained on 30-second chunks of audio ¹², and in our test it dropped a passage of 10 or more words in 4 of 84 whole-file readings, against 1 of 84 for Parakeet ^{13 14}. Parakeet is also faster: 9to5Mac transcribed a 3-hour podcast with speaker recognition in 1 minute 22 seconds in MacWhisper ¹⁵.

It depends on your Mac, license and task

Three limits to know. Parakeet is a Pro feature, and when MacWhisper first added it, it was English only ¹⁷, so check the current model list. Medium and Large need a Mac with more than 8 GB of memory ¹⁸. And Intel Macs lack dedicated machine learning hardware, which makes on-device transcription significantly slower ¹⁹.

What to do

1. Start with Large v3 Turbo. The free version supports Whisper models, though some are only fully available in Pro ²⁰. See whether MacWhisper is free.
2. Switch to the WhisperKit version of the model if you have an M-series Mac and long files with silence or music, as the maker says it gives better results there ²¹.
3. Test Parakeet v3 on your own worst recording. If errors fall, keep it for meetings. For recording calls see meeting recording.

For the same question about Whisper in general, see which Whisper model is best, and for the numbers behind accuracy, Whisper vs Parakeet accuracy. Our overview of dictation software places MacWhisper among its rivals.