sonic-speech/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-int8
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Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 (MLX, Encoder INT8)
NVIDIA Parakeet TDT v3 with encoder-only INT8 quantization — the recommended variant for most users. Zero WER degradation, 30% faster, 58% less memory than BF16.
See also:
- `sonic-speech/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3` — Full BF16 reference
- `sonic-speech/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-int4` — Encoder INT4 (lite)
Why INT8?
Benchmarked on Apple M3 Max (64 GB), macOS Sequoia 15.7.3, MLX 0.30.4.
Quantization Details
Only the Conformer encoder (~85% of parameters) is quantized to INT8 (group_size=64). The decoder and joint network remain in BF16, preserving precision for token generation.
Usage
from parakeet import from_pretrained
import mlx.core as mx
model = from_pretrained("sonic-speech/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-int8", dtype=mx.bfloat16)
result = model.transcribe("audio.wav")Install: pip install parakeet-mlx
Origin
Quantized from `sonic-speech/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3` using mlx.nn.quantize (encoder-only, 8-bit, group_size=64).
Part of the Sonic Speech model collection.
