NVIDIA's Parakeet speech models used to mean a Python stack: NeMo, PyTorch, and a GPU you kept warm. A new C++ port collapses that to one binary and one file.
From NeMo to GGUF: What the Port Covers
parakeet.cpp is a C++17 inference port that runs NVIDIA's Parakeet automatic speech recognition (ASR) models on the ggml tensor library — the same engine behind whisper.cpp and llama.cpp — with no Python, no NeMo, and no ONNX at inference time. The project is maintained by Ettore Di Giacinto (@mudler), author of LocalAI, and its first tagged release, v0.1.0, landed on May 30, 2026 . The code is MIT-licensed; the model weights keep their original NVIDIA Parakeet licenses. This is a community project, not an official NVIDIA release.
The port covers the offline Parakeet families — CTC, RNNT, TDT and hybrid TDT-CTC — in 110M, 0.6B and 1.1B sizes, plus a streaming 120M model with end-of-utterance detection . Two checkpoints anchor most use: parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, the English default that reports 6.05% average WER on the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard and was released 05/01/2025 , and parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3, which extends the same 600M FastConformer-TDT architecture to 25 European languages with automatic language detection, released 08/14/2025 .
