Introducing Live Subtitles, a Windows tray app that captions anything your PC is playing and isn't butt ugly. live and fully local. It runs NVIDIA's Parakeet-unified 0.6B on your GPU, puts words on screen about 0.36 s after they're spoken, and uses less than one CPU core while it does it.
I built a benchmark for it out of real TV, podcasts, earnings calls and a short film. Parakeet-unified scores 12.1% WER there, close to Nemotron streaming's 11.4%, but with much better punctuation and lower worst-case delay. Once a caption is on screen it never gets rewritten or jumps lines, and the overlay disappears when nobody's talking.
No NVIDIA GPU? It falls back to Nemotron on the CPU, which also covers 30 other languages. It can also write SRT/ASS/VTT files for videos on disk.
Windows only. The GPU engine needs an NVIDIA card with ~3.2 GB of free VRAM. MIT.
Edit: the first version of this post said 13.8% vs 17.0%. The replies caught a scoring bug (numbers weren't normalized), so the benchmark now uses Whisper's English normalizer and the numbers above are re-scored.
Surogate Speech is out ๐ small open speech models for agents, the speech side of Surogate.
First language shipped is Romanian, and the numbers came out better than I expected: 5.69% WER on FLEURS with a 116M model. Canary 1B gets 5.95% on the same clips, Whisper large-v3 8.42%. Leaderboard runner, one RTX 5090.
What's in it:
๐ง jackrabbit-110m-ro: speech recognition, 2,500ร real time on one GPU โก jackrabbit-110m-ro-streaming: live, final text about 0.7 s after you stop talking ๐ฃ๏ธ amami-357m-ro: TTS with three voices, runs on a CPU
Serving is one line with our engine: surogate serve --stt surogate/jackrabbit-110m-ro
Transcripts for every clip are public if you want to rescore it.
So far I've been pointing it at Markdown Minimap, an Obsidian plugin that adds a scrollable IDE-style minimap to your notes. This week I've been clearing a backlog of user-reported issues on it, with Claude often handling them end to end.
Introducing Inflect-v2, two exceptionally small, open-weight English TTS models at just 3.9M and 9.3M parameters. Both generate speech multiple times faster than real-time on CPU. Despite their size, Inflect-v2 delivers quality that is competitive with much larger lightweight TTS systems, including KittenTTS, Piper, and Supertonic-3.
CPU, CUDA, PyTorch, and ONNX are supported. Apache 2.0.
most labs won't bother teaching a small model to write and think in real romanian. no invented words, no english leaking in mid-sentence, diacritics intact.
we did.
surogate 3.5 is out. 2B and 4B, apache 2.0. invented word-forms cut from 4 per 1k down to ~1.5, and it reasons in the language you prompt it in, every time.
Turns out : if we predict ๐ earth we can save a lot of time looking for interesting things and less time looking at things that we expect to see.
Sentinel-2 imagery ๐ฐ๏ธbasically takes a long time to download towards earth. so our "near real time" systems are quite far from that in practical terms.
meanwhile , if we "predict" what we will see , based on what we do see , we can send down much less data in a timely way , and prioritize ๐กearth-bound response .
I'm talking about illegal fishing , logging , mining or building in nature reserves , the more of that we predict early the more we're able to stop it on time.