Moonshine v2 Medium: Fast, Lightweight English Dictation on Mac
Not every dictation setup needs the largest model. If you're dictating in English and want solid accuracy without a large download, Moonshine v2 Medium is worth considering. It weighs in at 200 MB — a third the size of Parakeet — and was designed specifically for devices where efficiency matters more than raw scale.
What Moonshine is
Moonshine was built by Useful Sensors, a company whose focus is on running powerful models on constrained hardware. The v2 Medium model has 245 million parameters and achieves a 6.65% word error rate on standard English benchmarks — a strong result for a model this compact.
The architecture makes a key choice that distinguishes it from Whisper-based models: it doesn't pad audio to fixed 30-second chunks. Whisper processes all audio as if it were 30 seconds long, which adds overhead for short utterances. Moonshine processes each segment at its actual length, which means fast responses when you're dictating short bursts — a sentence, a quick note, a voice command.
On Apple Silicon, that efficiency translates directly to responsiveness. Resonant's live preview feature uses a streaming version of Moonshine specifically because of how it handles variable-length audio.
When to choose Moonshine over Parakeet
Parakeet is more accurate on most English content. So why use Moonshine? A few scenarios:
Storage is limited. If you're on a Mac with a full drive and can only budget 200 MB for a dictation model, Moonshine delivers excellent quality for the size.
You only ever dictate in English. Parakeet's multilingual capability is genuinely useful, but if you never need it, Moonshine strips that complexity out. The model is trained purely on English and optimized accordingly.
You want the smallest viable footprint. Some people prefer keeping their tool dependencies minimal. Moonshine v2 Medium at 200 MB is a compact, capable choice that won't feel like overkill.
How to enable it in Resonant
Open Settings and navigate to the Transcription tab. You'll see the model list with download sizes. Select “Moonshine v2 Medium” — if it isn't already downloaded, Resonant will fetch it in the background while you keep working with your current model. Once downloaded, the switch is instant.
Note that Moonshine v2 Medium is English only. If you occasionally dictate in other languages, use Parakeet instead. Moonshine will attempt to transcribe other languages but accuracy drops significantly outside of English.
Like every model in Resonant, Moonshine runs entirely on your Mac. The 200 MB download lives locally and processes audio on your Neural Engine. No audio ever reaches an external server.
Download Resonant to try Moonshine v2 Medium locally.