My M1 16GB Mini and M2 16GB Air both deliver insane local transcription performance without eating up much memory - I think the M line + Parakeet delivers insane local performance and you get privacy for free

Yeah, that model is amazing. It even runs reasonably well on my mid-range Android phone with this quite simple but very useful application, as long as you don't speak for too long or interrupt yourself for transcribing every once in a while. I do have handy.computer on my Mac too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640855

I find the model works surprisingly well and in my opinion surpasses all other models I've tried. Finally a model that can mostly understand my not-so-perfect English and handle language switching mid sentence (compare that to Gemini's voice input, which is literally THE WORST, always trying to transcribe in the wrong language and even if the language is correct produces the uttermost crap imaginable).