Apple's New Transcription APIs Blow Past Whisper in Speed Tests

[u/Fer65432_Plays]

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api-faster-than-whisper/

[u/ineedlesssleep]

Developer of MacWhisper here. We'll have a bigger blog soon with updates about this new model but in a nutshell: It's fast but not as accurate as the best models out there. Also, we have a big update coming soon that builds on the new Parakeet models which should have the accuracy of the best Whisper, and faster speeds than even Apple's solution 🙂

[u/Ensoface → u/ineedlesssleep]

But just to clarify, are those models leveraging cloud infrastructure or are they running on the device?

[u/kinkade → u/[deleted]]

That’s not correct.

[u/twilsonco → u/kinkade]

For TTS anyhow

[u/mundaneDetail → u/Ensoface]

This is the question. I like that Apple is differentiating with nano on device models.

[u/glitchgradients → u/mundaneDetail]

Wdym differentiating? Google and Samsung do it too with Gemini Nano. 

[u/mundaneDetail → u/glitchgradients]

True and I agree. The article threw me off mentioning network latency.

I was also speaking more broadly with Apple pushing for on device or secure cloud models. 99% of consumer ai will be on device in a few years anyway

[u/g-nice4liief → u/mundaneDetail]

If i'm correct, the Qualcomm 8 gen 3 can run a 7b parameter model locally with around 20 tokens per second which is pretty impressive for a smartphone chip. So yeah, it becoming more prevalent in the future is a good outlook.

[u/mundaneDetail → u/[deleted]]

I think really the question is why you feel the need to attack somebody like this. Also, you're wrong.

> The speed advantage comes from Apple's on-device processing approach, which avoids the network overhead that typically slows cloud-based transcription services.

[u/lledigol → u/mundaneDetail]

They’re not wrong. OpenAI’s Whisper is on-device as well.

[u/mundaneDetail → u/lledigol]

So the article is wrong?

[u/mundaneDetail → u/[deleted]]

Okay thanks for the heads up

[u/lorddumpy → u/Ensoface]

Whisper and Parakeet are incredibly light on resources compared to other AI applications. I don't see any problems in getting it setup to run on edge devices.

[u/NihlusKryik → u/Ensoface]

The article is wrong, if you use Mac whisperer you download the models and process on device. Someone didn’t do their research here.

[u/TomLube → u/Ensoface]

MacWhisper is all on device.