The speech models in Koi

All seven run on your Mac, so dictation, recorded calls and transcribed files never go online. Parakeet comes inside the app. The other six are free downloads, one click each in Settings, under Dictation, and each is checked before Koi uses it. Between them, Koi writes 100 languages.

NVIDIA's Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 is what Koi uses until you pick another. It's the fastest of the seven and works out by itself which of its 25 European languages you're speaking: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian. These are the languages Koi offers when you first set it up.

• Whisper Base, Small and Large v3 Turbo (OpenAI). The ones for the most languages: 99, and 100 for Turbo, which adds Cantonese. Base is the lightest, Turbo the most accurate of the three. Base and Small can also type any language in English.
• Qwen3-ASR 1.7B (Alibaba Qwen). 29 languages, found by itself, and the pick for Chinese, Cantonese, Hindi, Thai, Indonesian and Korean.
• Cohere Transcribe (Cohere). 14 languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean. The most accurate here in English. You tell it which language you speak.
• Granite Speech 4.1 (IBM). English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. Accurate but the slowest, and in Koi it writes without punctuation or capitals. It can also type those languages in English.

These are the scores published with each model's transcribe.cpp conversion, the same files Koi runs, on clean read English. Your accent, microphone and room matter more than the gaps between the top four, so try two and keep the one that gets your words right.

• Speak a European language: keep Parakeet. It's built in and the fastest.
• Speak Chinese, Cantonese, Hindi, Thai or Korean: Qwen3-ASR.
• Want every English word right and don't mind a bigger download: Cohere Transcribe.
• Speak a language none of the others know, like Georgian, Hebrew or Tamil: Whisper Large v3 Turbo, or Small on an older Mac.
• Want to speak any language and get English: Whisper Small.

Switch in Settings, under Dictation. The model you're using keeps working until the new one has downloaded. The bigger models run best on Apple silicon. The same model writes down your dictation (Fn + ⌥), your recorded calls and the files you drop in.

Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cantonese, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Occitan, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish, Yoruba.

Each comes from at least one of the models above. The language list in Settings shows the ones the model you're using knows. Some languages Whisper knows have far less training behind them, so expect more mistakes in them than in English or Spanish.