Practical overview
When it fits
Use it when a Rust application needs to process audio with supported local model files and needs transcription, streaming output, timestamps or speaker attribution.
Who it is for
- Rust developers adding speech recognition to an application.
- Teams building streaming transcription or diarized transcript workflows.
- Developers evaluating ONNX Runtime or the experimental pure-Rust Burn inference backend.
Documented uses
- Convert audio samples into text.
- Process audio in chunks for streaming transcription.
- Return word or sentence timestamps where supported by the selected model.
- Distinguish speakers in supported diarization and multitalker workflows.
Requirements & limits
- ONNX Runtime is the default backend and requires one shared environment per process.
- Burn is presented as an experimental pure-Rust backend.
- Model capabilities differ: CTC is English-only, while TDT documents 25-language support and automatic detection.
- Streaming examples specify model-dependent chunk sizes; the EOU example uses normalized 16 kHz mono audio.
- The library repository is MIT-licensed, but selected model weights may have separate licenses.
Check current requirements in the official documentation. Source-based guidance does not mean OpenViST has run or independently tested this project.
Transcribe sample audio with the CTC model
Load the documented CTC model and retrieve a transcript with word-level timestamps.
Before you start
- A Rust project using parakeet-rs and the ONNX Runtime backend.
- The CTC model files: model.onnx, model.onnx_data and tokenizer.json.
- Audio samples supplied to the transcription call.
Steps
Initialize the ONNX Runtime environment and create an ExecutionConfig that uses it.
Load the CTC model with Parakeet::from_pretrained, pointing it to the local model directory.
Call transcribe_samples with the audio and TimestampMode::Words, then read the result text and token timestamps.
Expected outcome
A transcript and token-level start/end timestamps from the CTC model.
Guide limitations
- The documented CTC model is English-only.
- The README’s CTC example does not specify a complete audio-preparation recipe.
Process audio in chunks with EOU streaming
Feed 16 kHz mono audio to the documented EOU streaming recognizer in 160 ms chunks.
Before you start
- A Rust project using parakeet-rs with the ONNX Runtime backend.
- EOU model files: encoder.onnx, decoder_joint.onnx and tokenizer.json.
- Normalized 16 kHz mono audio represented as Vec.
Steps
Initialize the shared ONNX Runtime environment and create an ExecutionConfig.
Load ParakeetEOU from the local EOU model directory.
Split the audio into 2,560-sample chunks and pass each chunk to transcribe, printing returned text.
Expected outcome
Text is produced as successive audio chunks are processed.
Guide limitations
- The documented chunk size assumes 16 kHz audio.
- The example does not describe audio capture or end-to-end application deployment.
Sources & review
Source record details
- Source availability
- Active
- Sources checked
- 13 October 2026
- Original website title
- altunenes/parakeet-rs · Official homepage title · retained in its source language

