Why we skipped Apple's dictation for Russian

macOS can recognize Russian speech, but the text it returns has no commas, no periods, no question marks. Today we connected a different recognizer for Russian, a model called Parakeet, and here is why.

What Apple gives for Russian

Apple has two speech engines. The newer one, SpeechAnalyzer, is what we use for English. For Russian, Apple offers only the older dictation engine, and it does not put punctuation in. You get one long run of words.

Take a spoken phrase like: “Привет как дела сегодня хорошая погода я хочу пойти на прогулку”. Nothing marks where one sentence ends and the next starts. You can read it, but slowly, and you have to fix it by hand before you send it anywhere.

Why punctuation matters for us

It matters twice. First, reading: text without punctuation is tiring, and a dictation tool that makes you add every comma gives back the time it saved. Second, translation. Our app can translate what you dictate, and a translator needs to see where sentences end. If it gets one endless run of words, it guesses, and it guesses wrong in ways you will not notice unless you read both languages.

So an engine that leaves punctuation out was not good enough for the main scenario, speaking Russian and getting clean text, or clean English.

What we chose

Parakeet TDT v3 is a speech recognition model from NVIDIA. It has 0.6 billion parameters, supports Russian among other European languages, and writes punctuation and capital letters itself. We run it on the Mac through a library called FluidAudio, which packages the model for the Apple chip. The model is downloaded the first time the app needs it, from huggingface.co. The speech itself stays on your Mac.

It is a real cost. A recognizer from outside the system means a download and a dependency we have to maintain, and Apple’s engine would have been the simpler path. We took it because the alternative was text that fails at the first sentence break.

What we do not claim

We have not compared it against every recognizer on the market. We compared it with the one macOS offers for Russian, and in that comparison the missing punctuation decided the question. How accurate it is on your voice and your vocabulary is something we will keep measuring, and we will report what we find.

Today: the app downloads our own further-trained version of Parakeet, and the setup is described in languages and models.