# FluidAudio

7 Hacker News commenters recommended FluidAudio and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free Swift library and CLI for running Parakeet speech recognition on Apple devices, with fast inference. Critics note it lacks streaming support.

## Why people recommend it

- Parakeet models on Apple devices (2 comments): "Fluid Inference also have great implementations of Parakeet v2/v3 in CoreML for Apple devices" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932458)) "FluidAudio is a great option for those building Mac-only apps" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47182915))

## What people warn about

- No streaming support (1 comments): "I use fluidaudiocli and it's unfortunate that it doesn't support streaming" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908933))
- Audio decoding ran three times (1 comments): "audio decoding was happening three times instead of just once lol" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903758))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Apple SpeechAnalyzer API](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apple-speechanalyzer-api.md): 25 recommend
- [WhisperKit](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whisperkit.md): 6 recommend
- [sherpa-onnx](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sherpa-onnx.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "FluidAudio", https://hackerapproved.com/p/fluidaudio/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).