Language models (LLM)
For step-by-step setup instructions for LM Studio and Ollama, see the Local LLM Setup guide.
Speech-to-text (STT)
- All STT models are stored in
~/Library/Application Support/hyprnote/models/stt/ - The built-in whisper-cpp backend is now an optional compile-time feature. Production builds on macOS Apple Silicon use the Argmax sidecar by default. Whisper-cpp quantized models have been removed from the settings UI.
Cactus engine (beta)
Cactus is a local STT backend that runs optimized Whisper models. Cactus models are listed in Settings > Transcription under the Hyprnote provider. Models with an "Apple NPU" suffix use the Apple Neural Engine for hardware-accelerated inference on Apple Silicon Macs; non-Apple variants run on any platform.
| Model | Quantization | Platform |
|---|---|---|
| Whisper Small (INT4) | INT4 | General |
| Whisper Small (INT8) | INT8 | General |
| Whisper Small (INT8, Apple NPU) | INT8 | Apple Silicon |
| Whisper Medium (INT4) | INT4 | General |
| Whisper Medium (INT4, Apple NPU) | INT4 | Apple Silicon |
| Whisper Medium (INT8) | INT8 | General |
| Whisper Medium (INT8, Apple NPU) | INT8 | Apple Silicon |
Cactus models are downloaded and managed from the Settings UI. They are stored in a separate cactus/ directory within the models folder.
Timestamps: Cactus v1.11+ produces word-level timestamps in transcription output, enabling precise alignment of transcript words with audio playback.
Custom vocabulary: Cactus supports custom vocabulary to improve recognition accuracy for domain-specific terms, names, and acronyms. Custom vocabulary words are defined in Settings > Intelligence > Memory and are passed to the Cactus engine during both streaming and batch transcription.
Argmax models
Manual download:
| URL | Folder |
|---|---|
| https://huggingface.co/argmaxinc/whisperkit-pro/tree/main/openai_whisper-large-v3-v20240930_626MB | openai_whisper-large-v3-v20240930_626MB |
| https://huggingface.co/argmaxinc/parakeetkit-pro/tree/main/nvidia_parakeet-v2_476MB | nvidia_parakeet-v2_476MB |
| https://huggingface.co/argmaxinc/parakeetkit-pro/tree/main/nvidia_parakeet-v3_494MB | nvidia_parakeet-v3_494MB |
| https://huggingface.co/argmaxinc/ctckit-pro/tree/main/parakeet-tdt_ctc-110m | parakeet-tdt_ctc-110m |
For details on how your data is handled when using local vs cloud models, see AI Models & Data Privacy.
If you have Huggingface CLI installed:
hf download argmaxinc/whisperkit-pro \
--include "openai_whisper-large-v3-v20240930_626MB/*" \
--local-dir "$HOME/Library/Application Support/hyprnote/models/stt"