> Nvidia parakeet and canary are better and faster

Is that based on your own experience using those and also Whisper, comparing them side-by-side? Or is that based just on those benchmark results?

Yes for parakeet, but only comparing benchmark results for canary. Whisper also has severe hallucinations on silence and noise and WhisperX helps a lot, it adds voice activity detection i.e. a model to detect when someone speaks, to filter the input before running whisper. https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX