Which Superwhisper model is best?

The best Superwhisper model depends on your plan, your computer and your room. On the Free plan, Whisper Large v3 Turbo is the model to use. On Pro, Parakeet is the faster local choice and held up better in noise in our test. For the cloud, Superwhisper itself recommends S1-Voice, and for local use it recommends Cohere Transcribe or Parakeet Multilanguage ¹. Checked October 27, 2026.

The full picture is in our guide to Superwhisper: price, models and privacy. This page only answers the model question.

Superwhisper offers local and cloud models at two price levels

Pro is what unlocks Parakeet, Cohere and the cloud models ⁵. The cloud list also includes Deepgram Nova and ElevenLabs Scribe, plus the language models used for rewriting ⁶. What each plan costs is in the question is Superwhisper free?.

Old names. Reviews from before 2026 mention "Ultra." Whisper Large was formerly Superwhisper Ultra, Whisper Large v3 Turbo was Ultra V3 Turbo, and the small models were Standard, Nano and Fast ⁷. So "Ultra vs Parakeet" means Whisper vs Parakeet.

Whisper is slightly more accurate in a quiet room, Parakeet is faster

We tested both families on a Mac, and we make Yap, which uses Parakeet, so check the raw data if it matters to you. Accuracy is measured as word error rate, the share of words wrong (lower is better).

On 100 English recordings, Whisper large-v3-turbo scored 3.92 percent ⁸ and Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 4.48 percent ⁹. Parakeet ran about 19 times faster than real time ¹⁰, Whisper about 12 times ¹¹. That speed measure is the real-time factor.

Parakeet pulls ahead in noise

With background talk 5 dB quieter than the speaker, about a loud cafe, Whisper's error rate rose to 13.92 percent ¹² while Parakeet's reached 7.85 percent ¹³. In a quiet room the two were close, at 3.78 ¹⁴ and 4.44 percent ¹⁵. Our guide to dictation in background noise explains why.

On long readings of 3 to 4 minutes, Whisper dropped 10 or more words in a row in 4 of 84 readings ¹⁶ and Parakeet in 1 of 84 ¹⁷.

The maker's own numbers favor S1-Voice, with caveats

Superwhisper reports 6.6 percent for its S1-Voice cloud model across eight datasets ¹⁸, and 8.4 percent for Cohere Transcribe on an Apple M4, which it calls its most accurate local model ¹⁹. Those datasets are harder than ours, the maker ran the test, and no one outside the company has confirmed it. Do not compare them with our figures.

Two warnings from the documentation: Parakeet can struggle with punctuation and occasionally invents text on one-word recordings ²⁰. And our test sentences were read aloud, not dictated, with a different runtime for Parakeet than Superwhisper uses ²¹.

Your hardware and language can override the ranking

• Intel Mac: Parakeet and Cohere are not available, so use Whisper or a cloud model ²².
• Windows ARM: the local option is Parakeet Multilanguage ²³.
• A language outside Parakeet's 24 or Cohere's 14: use multilingual Whisper or a cloud model.
• Audio must stay on the device: any local model, with Voice mode. See does Superwhisper work offline?.

What to pick

Test two models on your own voice for a day each. Our explainer on Whisper covers the family, and Superwhisper vs Apple Dictation shows how a built-in engine compares.