Model reference · open weights

parakeet-rnnt

Available as managed deployment Audio nvidia Speech→text 2 variants 70k dl/mo

parakeet-rnnt is an open-weight audio or speech model from nvidia. AxForge deploys and operates it for you on dedicated EU-owned hardware — with the licence handled where one is required.

Available as managed deployment — configured and operated for you on dedicated EU hardware, quoted per deployment.

What it is

Released byNVIDIA
TypeAudio & music
TaskSpeech→text
Parameters (lead)617M
Runs withnemo
Released2023-12-28
Popularity70k downloads / month
LicenceOpen weights

About

What parakeet-rnnt is

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parakeet-rnnt-0.6b is an ASR model that transcribes speech in lower case English alphabet. This model is jointly developed by NVIDIA NeMo and Suno.ai teams. It is an XL version of FastConformer Transducer [1] (around 600M parameters) model. See the model architecture section and NeMo documentation for complete architecture details.

Read the full model card

Licence/Terms of Use

License to use this model is covered by the CC-BY-4.0. By downloading the public and release version of the model, you accept the terms and conditions of the CC-BY-4.0 license.

Discover more from NVIDIA:

For documentation, deployment guides, enterprise-ready APIs, and the latest open models—including Nemotron and other cutting-edge speech, translation, and generative AI—visit the NVIDIA Developer Portal at developer.nvidia.com. Join the community to access tools, support, and resources to accelerate your development with NVIDIA’s NeMo, Riva, NIM, and foundation models.

Explore more from NVIDIA:

What is Nemotron? NVIDIA Developer Nemotron NVIDIA Riva Speech NeMo Documentation

How to Use this Model

The model is available for use in the NeMo toolkit [3], and can be used as a pre-trained checkpoint for inference or for fine-tuning on another dataset.

You can also run Parakeet RNNT with Transformers 🤗 (more below).

1) NeMo usage

To train, fine-tune or play with the model you will need to install NVIDIA NeMo. We recommend you install it after you've installed latest PyTorch version.

pip install nemo_toolkit['all']
Automatically instantiate the model
import nemo.collections.asr as nemo_asr
asr_model = nemo_asr.models.EncDecRNNTBPEModel.from_pretrained(model_name="nvidia/parakeet-rnnt-0.6b")
Transcribing using Python

First, let's get a sample

wget https://dldata-public.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/2086-149220-0033.wav

Then simply do:

output = asr_model.transcribe(['2086-149220-0033.wav'])
print(output[0].text)
Transcribing many audio files
python [NEMO_GIT_FOLDER]/examples/asr/transcribe_speech.py
 pretrained_name="nvidia/parakeet-rnnt-0.6b"
 audio_dir=""

2) Transformers 🤗 usage

Parakeet RNNT is available in 🤗 Transformers starting from v5.13.0.

pip install "transformers>=5.13.0"
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("automatic-speech-recognition", model="nvidia/parakeet-rnnt-0.6b")
out = pipe("https://huggingface.co/datasets/hf-internal-testing/dummy-audio-samples/resolve/main/bcn_weather.mp3")
print(out)
from transformers import AutoModelForRNNT, AutoProcessor
from datasets import load_dataset, Audio

num_samples = 3

model_id = "nvidia/parakeet-rnnt-0.6b"
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForRNNT.from_pretrained(model_id, dtype="auto", device_map="auto")

ds = load_dataset("hf-internal-testing/librispeech_asr_dummy", "clean", split="validation")
ds = ds.cast_column("audio", Audio(sampling_rate=processor.feature_extractor.sampling_rate))
speech_samples = [el["array"] for el in ds["audio"][:num_samples]]

inputs = processor(speech_samples, sampling_rate=processor.feature_extractor.sampling_rate)
inputs.to(model.device, dtype=model.dtype)
output = model.generate(**inputs, return_dict_in_generate=True)
print(processor.decode(output.sequences, skip_special_tokens=True))
from datasets import Audio, load_dataset
from transformers import AutoModelForRNNT, AutoProcessor

num_samples = 3

model_id = "nvidia/parakeet-rnnt-0.6b"
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForRNNT.from_pretrained(model_id, dtype="auto", device_map="auto")

ds = load_dataset("hf-internal-testing/librispeech_asr_dummy", "clean", split="validation")
ds = ds.cast_column("audio", Audio(sampling_rate=processor.feature_extractor.sampling_rate))
speech_samples = [el["array"] for el in ds["audio"][:num_samples]]

inputs = processor(speech_samples, sampling_rate=processor.feature_extractor.sampling_rate)
inputs.to(model.device, dtype=model.dtype)
output = model.generate(**inputs, return_dict_in_generate=True)
decoded_output, decoded_timestamps = processor.decode(
    output.sequences,
    durations=output.durations,
    skip_special_tokens=True,
)
print("Transcription:", decoded_output)
print("Timestamped tokens:", decoded_timestamps)
from transformers import AutoModelForRNNT, AutoProcessor
from datasets import load_dataset, Audio
import torch

model_id = "nvidia/parakeet-rnnt-0.6b"
NUM_SAMPLES = 4

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForRNNT.from_pretrained(model_id, dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="auto")
model.train()

ds = load_dataset("hf-internal-testing/librispeech_asr_dummy", "clean", split="validation")
ds = ds.cast_column("audio", Audio(sampling_rate=processor.feature_extractor.sampling_rate))
speech_samples = [el["array"] for el in ds["audio"][:NUM_SAMPLES]]
text_samples = ds["text"][:NUM_SAMPLES]

# passing `text` to the processor will prepare inputs' `labels` key
inputs = processor(audio=speech_samples, text=text_samples, sampling_rate=processor.feature_

From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.

Benchmarks

Reported results

As published on the model card — the maker's own numbers, not measured by AxForge.

TaskDatasetMetricScore
Automatic Speech RecognitionAMI (Meetings test)Test WER17.550
Automatic Speech RecognitionEarnings-22Test WER14.780
Automatic Speech RecognitionGigaSpeechTest WER10.070
Automatic Speech RecognitionLibriSpeech (clean)Test WER1.630
Automatic Speech RecognitionLibriSpeech (other)Test WER3.060
automatic-speech-recognitionSPGI SpeechTest WER3.470
automatic-speech-recognitiontedlium-v3Test WER3.860
Automatic Speech RecognitionVox PopuliTest WER6.050
automatic-speech-recognitionMozilla Common Voice 9.0Test WER8.070

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys parakeet-rnnt for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (parakeet-rnnt below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)

$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/audio/transcriptions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
  -F model="parakeet-rnnt" -F file=@audio.mp3

Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 3M free tokens every 30 days with every new account.

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