Parakeet TDT
NVIDIA's open-source ASR model family. Parakeet TDT v3 is Mac Note Taker's default English transcription model on the Neural Engine.
Parakeet TDT (Token-and-Duration Transducer) is a streaming ASR architecture released by NVIDIA in 2024 and updated through 2026. It is trained on a large multilingual corpus and produces word-level timestamps natively, which makes it a clean fit for live meeting transcription where the UI needs to highlight the current word as it is spoken.
Parakeet TDT v3 is Mac Note Taker's default ASR model. The CoreML port runs on the Apple Neural Engine at roughly 8x real-time on an M2 and 12-15x real-time on an M3 Pro. Word error rate on clean Zoom audio sits between 4% and 7% on conversational English in 2026 benchmarks. For 99-language coverage at higher latency, the app can swap to Whisper Large v3.
Related terms
- ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) ↗The model layer that converts spoken audio into written text. The first stage of any meeting transcription pipeline.
- Whisper ↗OpenAI's open-source ASR model. Whisper Large v3 is Mac Note Taker's high-accuracy multilingual option.
- ANE (Apple Neural Engine) ↗Shorter name for the Apple Neural Engine - the per-chip ML accelerator that runs Mac Note Taker's transcription and diarization models.