System requirements
Supported
macOS 13 Ventura or newer. Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, M4) and Intel Macs are both supported. Apple Silicon is significantly faster for local Whisper models because Hyprcore uses Metal.
8 GB RAM minimum. 16 GB is comfortable for the larger models.
5 GB free disk space. Most of this is for speech models you choose to download. You can keep just one or two installed.
A microphone. Built-in is fine for dictation; an external mic is better for long meetings.
Recommended
Apple Silicon Mac with 16 GB RAM. All local models run smoothly, including Whisper Large.
macOS 14 Sonoma or 15 Sequoia for the most reliable system audio capture in meetings.
What works on which hardware
Model | Apple Silicon | Intel Mac | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Parakeet V3 (CPU) | Excellent | Excellent | ~5× real-time on a recent Mac. Best default for dictation. |
Parakeet V2 (CPU) | Excellent | Excellent | Older Parakeet generation. Stick with V3 unless you have a reason. |
Whisper Small | Good | Good | Fast, decent accuracy. |
Whisper Medium | Good | OK | Good balance for meetings. |
Whisper Turbo | Excellent | Slow | Use on Apple Silicon if you want speed on long audio. |
Whisper Large | Excellent | Slow | Highest local accuracy. |
NVIDIA Canary | Excellent | OK | Strong multilingual accuracy (English, Spanish, French, German). Apple Silicon recommended. |
Moonshine | Good | Good | Very fast, English only. Handles accents well. |
SenseVoice | Good | OK | Very fast. Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese. |
Breeze | Good | OK | Optimized for Taiwanese Mandarin, with code-switching support. |
GigaAM | Good | OK | Russian speech recognition. |
For cloud STT (Deepgram, Groq, OpenAI), the only requirement is a working internet connection.
Network
Hyprcore needs internet access to sign in and to fetch your speech models on first launch. After that, transcription itself runs entirely on your Mac.
Network is also used for:
Auto-updates.
Cloud transcription, AI summaries, and sync (only if you turn them on).
The web dashboard at app.hyprcore.ai.
Platform support
Hyprcore is macOS only. There is no Windows or Linux build, and no plan to add one.
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