Is Underdog Bark 3.0 state of the art?Pending benchmarks.Announced Oct 20, 2026; no independent results yet.
Underdog's small open English speech-to-text model, built to run on Macs and phones. It is a 0.6B fine-tune of NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3, packed into a 163 MB download, and powers dictation and meeting notes in the Underdog app. CC BY 4.0. Speech-to-text, not text-to-speech, and not Suno's Bark.
The details so far
- Lab
- Underdog
- Announced
- Oct 20, 2026
- API
- Not yet
- Open weights
- Published
- Parameters
- About 0.6B (163 MB download)
- Task
- Speech-to-text, English only
- Base model
- NVIDIA parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3, via moondream/parakeet-ultra
- Family
- Bark 3.0 (163 MB), Bark 3.0 Plus (180 MB), Bark 3.0 Pro (1.25 GB, full precision) and Bark 3.0 Clean (180 MB, drops fillers and false starts)
- License
- CC BY 4.0 (same as the Parakeet base)
- Weights
- Hugging Face org ConwayResearch; repos created Oct 15, 2026 (UTC)
- Runtimes
- PyTorch loader, MLX on Apple silicon, Core ML; native in the Underdog app
Tags marked unsure are not stated on the lab's own pages.
What would let us call it
Verdicts use only independent boards we already track. Two consecutive snapshots are required before any crown.
- Publicly announced with a source
- Usable by the public (API or weights)
- Listed on an independent board we track
- Enough results for a rank in a category
- Holds across two snapshots (crowns only)
What the lab claims
Self-reported. Shown for context; not used in any verdict.
Lab claim: 4.94% average word error rate on the Open ASR Leaderboard's seven English sets (7.82% on AMI meetings), against 4.94% for Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 and 6.04% for Whisper large-v3. Underdog scored Bark itself with the leaderboard's code; it is not on the leaderboard.
Lab claim: the #1 frontier speech model, and transcribes a minute of audio in under 0.25 s on a MacBook. The model card gives about 1.5 s per minute on an M2 laptop with stock mlx-audio.
Sources
LABUnderdog announcement on Xx.com/UnderdogAI/status/2112733007484518470 · Oct 20, 2026LABUnderdog Bark 3.0 pageunderdog.ai/bark · Oct 20, 2026REPOUnderdog-Bark-3.0 on Hugging Facehuggingface.co/ConwayResearch/Underdog-Bark-3.0 · Oct 20, 2026Tracking continues until an independent board lists it.