Model reference · open weights
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 by | NVIDIA |
|---|---|
| Type | Audio & music |
| Task | Speech→text |
| Parameters (lead) | 617M |
| Runs with | nemo |
| Released | 2023-12-28 |
| Popularity | 70k downloads / month |
| Licence | Open weights |
About
img { display: inline; }
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.
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.
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.
What is Nemotron? NVIDIA Developer Nemotron NVIDIA Riva Speech NeMo Documentation
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).
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']
import nemo.collections.asr as nemo_asr
asr_model = nemo_asr.models.EncDecRNNTBPEModel.from_pretrained(model_name="nvidia/parakeet-rnnt-0.6b")
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)
python [NEMO_GIT_FOLDER]/examples/asr/transcribe_speech.py
pretrained_name="nvidia/parakeet-rnnt-0.6b"
audio_dir=""
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
As published on the model card — the maker's own numbers, not measured by AxForge.
| Task | Dataset | Metric | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Automatic Speech Recognition | AMI (Meetings test) | Test WER | 17.550 |
| Automatic Speech Recognition | Earnings-22 | Test WER | 14.780 |
| Automatic Speech Recognition | GigaSpeech | Test WER | 10.070 |
| Automatic Speech Recognition | LibriSpeech (clean) | Test WER | 1.630 |
| Automatic Speech Recognition | LibriSpeech (other) | Test WER | 3.060 |
| automatic-speech-recognition | SPGI Speech | Test WER | 3.470 |
| automatic-speech-recognition | tedlium-v3 | Test WER | 3.860 |
| Automatic Speech Recognition | Vox Populi | Test WER | 6.050 |
| automatic-speech-recognition | Mozilla Common Voice 9.0 | Test WER | 8.070 |
Using it via the API
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.