AI in practice

Nvidia's latest open-source speech recognition models beat OpenAI's Whisper v3

Matthias Bastian
a Parakeet made out of digital computer code

Midjourney prompted by THE DECODER

NVIDIA NeMo, an open-source conversational AI toolkit, has released Parakeet, a set of automatic speech recognition (ASR) models. Developed in partnership with Suno.ai, the four Parakeet models, ranging from 0.6 to 1.1 billion parameters, can transcribe spoken English and are available for commercial use under the CC BY 4.0 license. The models were trained on 64,000 hours of audio data covering different accents, ranges, and sound conditions. According to the developers, the models are robust to non-speech segments such as music and silence, and outperform OpenAI's Whisper v3 in benchmarks. They also offer user-friendly integration into projects through pre-trained control points. A demo of the 1.1 billion parameter model is available here.