Offline voice with NVIDIA Parakeet

Parakeet is the “it just works” dictation engine: a local NVIDIA speech model that transcribes on your machine. No account, no key, no network round-trip — your audio never leaves the PC.

How it arrives

1. On first launch, Mastery HQ starts downloading the model quietly in the background.
2. Once present, the voice engine defaults to Parakeet (unless you had already chosen another engine yourself).
3. Check or change this any time in Settings → Voice.

Why pick it

• Private — audio is processed locally, full stop.
• Free — no per-minute API billing.
• Offline — dictation keeps working on a plane or a locked-down network.

Good to know

• The download is best-effort: if it fails (disk, network), the browser engine keeps working and Parakeet retries later.
• There is no Parakeet process to see — the engine runs per utterance and exits when transcription finishes, so nothing shows in Task Manager between dictations. That’s normal, not broken. To prove it’s healthy, click Test voice engine in Settings → Voice: it runs a real on-device transcription and reports the result.
• Accuracy is strong for command-length utterances — exactly what the command bar needs. For long free-form dictation, the OpenAI engine may edge it out.