Transcribe multilingual audio with Parakeet TDT

Whisper handles English well and several other languages adequately. For multilingual audio where accuracy matters, we switch to Parakeet TDT.

Parakeet TDT is a single GGUF that handles 25+ languages out of the box. The same model file transcribes French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, and more without a language code. The addon auto-detects TDT vs CTC vs Sortformer from the GGUF's internal metadata, so the load is the same as Whisper's.

modelType: "parakeet-transcription" tells the engine which Parakeet family to load: TDT (default), CTC (smaller), Sortformer (diarization). The load with that flag set would look like the following:

const modelId = await loadModel({
  modelSrc: PARAKEET_TDT_0_6B_V3_Q8_0,
  modelType: "parakeet-transcription",
});

TDT returns a single string per file, no per-segment data. Note that without overrides the call is minimal. For example:

const text = await transcribe({
  modelId,
  audioChunk: "./examples/qvac/transcription/input/sample-16khz.wav",
});
console.log(text);

No modelConfig.language. No prompt. No VAD. The only flag you need is modelType: "parakeet-transcription" so the SDK routes the call to the right addon.

Note: Parakeet handles VAD internally, so no separate VAD model is needed. If you need explicit end-of-utterance detection for conversation, load PARAKEET_EOU_120M_V1_Q8_0 alongside and pass parakeetStreamingConfig to transcribeStream.

Put it to the test

1. Call loadModel({ modelSrc: PARAKEET_TDT_0_6B_V3_Q8_0, modelType: "parakeet-transcription" }) and transcribe({ modelId, audioChunk: "./examples/qvac/transcription/input/sample-16khz.wav" }). No language or prompt field.
2. console.log the returned text.