{"slug": "show-hn-speech-to-text-in-the-browser-with-whisper-and-parakeet-no-server", "title": "Show HN: Speech-to-text in the browser with Whisper and Parakeet, no server", "summary": "A developer released browser-whisper, an open-source JavaScript library that runs speech-to-text entirely in the browser with no server, using WebGPU, WebCodecs (via mediabunny) and Transformers.js for zero-server inference. The library supports eight models, including whisper-tiny, whisper-base and whisper-small (multilingual, 99 languages), English-only moonshine-tiny, moonshine-base, distil-whisper-small and parakeet-ctc-0.6b, and parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3, which covers 25 European languages with auto-detection and runs on WebGPU only. Users can pass any BCP-47 language code to skip auto-detection for slightly faster and more accurate transcription, and the bundled Parakeet models from NVIDIA are licensed CC BY 4.0, converted to ONNX and quantized by istupakov, ysdede and onnx-community.", "body_md": "\n\n``` js\nimport { BrowserWhisper } from 'browser-whisper';\n\nconst whisper = new BrowserWhisper({ model: 'whisper-base' });\n\nfor await (const { text, start, end } of whisper.transcribe(file)) {\n    console.log(`[${start}-${end}s]: ${text}`);\n}\n```\n\nTry it in the browser\n\n        Native [WebGPU](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGPU_API) audio\n        transcription. Connects directly to [WebCodecs](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebCodecs_API) ([mediabunny](https://mediabunny.dev)) and [Transformers.js](https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers.js) for zero-server\n        inference.\n      \n\nModels & language support\n\n| Model | Languages | `language` | \n|---|---|---|\n| `whisper-tiny` | Multilingual · 99 languages | ✓ | \n| `whisper-base` | Multilingual · 99 languages | ✓ | \n| `whisper-small` | Multilingual · 99 languages | ✓ | \n| `moonshine-tiny` | English only | — | \n| `moonshine-base` | English only | — | \n| `distil-whisper-small` | English only | — | \n| `parakeet-ctc-0.6b` | English only | — | \n| `parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3` | 25 European languages, auto-detected (WebGPU only) | — | \n\n  Model credits: [Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3) by NVIDIA, licensed under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Changes: converted to ONNX and quantized by [istupakov](https://huggingface.co/istupakov/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-onnx)/[ysdede](https://huggingface.co/ysdede/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-onnx); runs with [parakeet.js](https://github.com/ysdede/parakeet.js) (MIT). [Parakeet CTC 0.6B](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-ctc-0.6b) by NVIDIA, licensed under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Changes: converted to ONNX and quantized by [onnx-community](https://huggingface.co/onnx-community). Whisper by OpenAI (MIT). Moonshine by Useful Sensors (MIT). Distil-Whisper by Hugging Face (MIT). Lite-Whisper by efficient-speech (Apache-2.0). ONNX exports by [onnx-community](https://huggingface.co/onnx-community). [All third-party notices](https://github.com/tanpreetjolly/browser-whisper/blob/main/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md).\n\nPass any BCP-47 code as `language` to skip auto-detection — slightly faster and more accurate when the language is known.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-speech-to-text-in-the-browser-with-whisper-and-parakeet-no-server", "canonical_source": "https://whisper.tanpreet.xyz/", "published_at": "2026-10-26 10:53:04+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-26 11:14:14.768228+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "developer-tools", "artificial-intelligence", "natural-language-processing"], "entities": ["browser-whisper", "Whisper", "Parakeet", "NVIDIA", "Transformers.js", "WebGPU", "WebCodecs", "OpenAI"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-speech-to-text-in-the-browser-with-whisper-and-parakeet-no-server", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-speech-to-text-in-the-browser-with-whisper-and-parakeet-no-server.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-speech-to-text-in-the-browser-with-whisper-and-parakeet-no-server.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-speech-to-text-in-the-browser-with-whisper-and-parakeet-no-server.jsonld"}}