Parakeet CTC 0.6b
NVIDIA · released Dec 28, 2023 · nvidia/parakeet-ctc-0.6b
Speech to textTranscribes a recording into words
- Type
- Open weightsCreative Commons Attribution 4.0
- Languages
- 1
- Size
- 0.6B
Context measured in tokens
Our take
Written Sep 4, 2026Parakeet CTC is a 0.6-billion-parameter speech-to-text model from NVIDIA that processes audio faster than real time. It is free to use with attribution, but its accuracy sits below the middle of the field on nearly every condition we measure.
Pick this when raw speed matters more than precision — it turns an hour of audio into text in under a second on standard hardware. Use it for lightweight local deployment where a tiny footprint beats exactness, or for clean English read-aloud and financial-call audio where it performs least poorly. Skip it if you need broad language coverage, work with accented speakers or meeting recordings, or demand above-median accuracy.
The case for it
- Processes audio at nearly six-thousand times real time on the benchmark rig — an hour of audio in under a second.
- Only 0.6 billion parameters, making it easy to run locally or on edge hardware.
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence allows commercial use with attribution.
The case against it
- Below-median accuracy on most audio: 6.73% of words wrong on average against a 5.8% field middle.
- Struggles with harder conditions — 13.47% wrong on accented speech and 13.1% in meetings, both well above the norm.
- English only; no measured data for any other language.
How good is it?
An open speech-to-text model for turning recordings into written text, though it struggles more than most with accented speakers.
- transcribing speakers with a range of accentsAccented speech · 59th of 76
TranscriptionTurning speech into text2.5 of 5Open ASR WER · 57th of 76
93.8%
Misses roughly one word in 16, averaged over nine English test sets.
5,870×11th of 74
an hour of audio in under a second, on the board's own hardware. Your machine will differ.
1
Listed on the model card. The accuracy above is English only.
Percentage of words wrong on each set, lower better. Bars are scaled to this model's own worst case; the placing beneath each rate is against every model measured on that set.
The figures above come from the Open ASR Leaderboard, an independent public test that runs every model on the same recordings. It is the only measurement of transcription quality we know of, so there are no other scores to show.
Each of these is the same transcription job on a different kind of recording, so together they say where it holds up and where it slips — not how closely it follows an instruction.
Every published score for this model9 scoresEvery figure we hold, from 9 boards, with who ran it and a link to the source — including the boards no rating above is built on.
Can you run it yourself?
Comfortable fit
GeForce RTX 4090 · 24 GB
Room to spare. 21.2 GB spare means a 10% error in the size would not change the answer.
Apple M1 Pro (16-core GPU) · 32 GB
Room to spare. 22.4 GB spare means a 10% error in the size would not change the answer.
Apple M1 (8-core GPU, 8GB unified) · 8 GB
Room to spare. 4.4 GB spare means a 10% error in the size would not change the answer.
These cards answer whether Parakeet CTC 0.6b loads, not how fast it transcribes. Throughput figures for a transcription model come from its text decoder, so treat this as a fit answer rather than a speed one.
Memory use by level
Against a 24 GB card.
What is quantisation? →This model on every device we track71 devicesThe Q4 build most people download, on each device: what the weights come to, how much context the memory leaves, and whether it runs. Smallest device that runs it first. This is a fit answer: whether it loads, not how fast it transcribes.
Models people weigh against Parakeet CTC 0.6b
When we formed this view
Recent changes
What moved
first indexed by our pipelineEach date is the day we first saw the change, or the day the maker announced it.
What we do not know about this model yet
- We hold no measured file for it, so all 3 sizes on this page are calculated from the parameter count.
- Nothing we hold says whether an endpoint streams, so we do not show it either way.
Licence and identifiers
What the licence allowsCreative Commons Attribution 4.0, what it allows commercially, and the identifiers you need to pull this model — its Hugging Face repo, our slug and a machine-readable card.
Licence
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Permissive content license: any use with attribution. Common for datasets and some model weights.
Identifiers
- Hugging Face
- nvidia/parakeet-ctc-0.6b
- Architecture
- Dense
- Takes in, gives back
- Audio in, text out
- Catalogue slug
- nvidia-parakeet-ctc-0-6b