Whisper
OpenAI's open-source ASR model. Whisper Large v3 is Mac Note Taker's high-accuracy multilingual option.
Whisper is a family of encoder-decoder Transformer ASR models that OpenAI released in 2022 and continued updating through Large v3. It covers 99 languages and is widely considered the accuracy baseline for open-weight transcription. It is slower than streaming architectures like Parakeet but more robust to noisy or accented speech and to languages outside the European cluster.
Mac Note Taker bundles Whisper Large v3 and Distil-Large v3 (a smaller, faster distillation) as alternatives to Parakeet. The choice is per meeting in Settings -> Transcription. Whisper runs on the Apple Neural Engine via CoreML; on an M3 Pro, Large v3 transcribes a 60-minute meeting in roughly 4-6 minutes after the meeting ends.
Related terms
- ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) ↗The model layer that converts spoken audio into written text. The first stage of any meeting transcription pipeline.
- 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.
- 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.