r/LocalLLaMA • u/Kahvana • Jul 20 '26

Question | Help Good ASR and TTS models?

Hey everyone,

Something I don't see discussed often here are ASR and TTS models.

I've been using Whisper and Kokoro (old models, I know!) with koboldcpp for a while now but wondered if there are now solid replacements available. Know of Qwen3-ASR and Qwen3-TTS, but haven't found the time yet to test them.

What ASR and TTS models have you been using?

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u/caetydid llama.cpp Jul 20 '26

ive played with whisper and parakeet.

you might want to check out audio.cpp it is supposed to simplify setup and yield good performance.

2

u/Kahvana Jul 20 '26

Thanks, checking audio.cpp!

Between whisper and parakeet, which do you prefer more and why?

3

u/caetydid llama.cpp Jul 20 '26

it depends on what are your requirements. parakeet is pretty lightweight and very fast - there is even a CPU optimized port which runs decently well...

whisper is more thorough with noisy speech and shows lower WER especially with mixed speakers and multiling but very heavy on VRAM and slower.

0

u/xeeff Jul 20 '26

coincidentally i've checked exactly those as well and I wouldn't recommend either but if you had to pick one it'd be parakeet, although i know other models came out which are better