What Parakeet gets right about real-time transcription

Accuracy gets the headlines in speech recognition. But for a tool you reach for dozens of times a day, latency is the whole game. A perfect transcript that arrives a beat too late feels broken.

The latency bar

Dictation has to keep up with thought. If there’s a visible lag between finishing a sentence and seeing it land, the illusion breaks and you start waiting on the tool instead of using it.

Why local helps

Running transcription on-device removes the network round-trip entirely. That’s a big chunk of latency you simply never pay, which is most of why dolfinspeak’s everyday path feels immediate.

The trade

Local models have to be efficient enough to run on your machine in real time without melting the battery. That constraint shapes everything — and it’s a constraint worth accepting for how instant it makes the result feel.