Models
Herga uses two local models, both running on your Mac’s GPU through Apple’s MLX framework:
- Whisper turns your speech into text.
- Qwen3 cleans that text up.
Choose them in Settings › Transcription & refinement, and manage downloads in the Models tab.
Speech (Whisper)
Section titled “Speech (Whisper)”| Model | Size on disk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Base | 290 MB | Fastest, least accurate |
| Small | 970 MB | A good fallback for slow connections or small disks |
| Medium | 3.1 GB | |
| Large v3 | 3.1 GB | Most accurate, slowest |
| Turbo | 1.6 GB | Default. Close to Large in quality and much faster |
Turbo is the right choice for almost everyone. Whisper stays loaded while Herga is running, so your first dictation is as fast as the rest.
Language: Auto-detect, English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese or Hindi. Picking your language is a little faster and more reliable than auto-detect.
Cleanup (Qwen3)
Section titled “Cleanup (Qwen3)”| Model | Size on disk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 0.6B | 400 MB | Default. Fast, and good at everyday cleanup |
| 1.7B | 1.1 GB | Better with long, rambling dictations |
| 4B | 2.5 GB | Best at following your style and at Command Mode rewrites |
Larger models give better results but take longer and use more memory.
To skip cleanup and get Whisper’s text as-is, turn off Refine transcripts automatically. You can still refine any capture later.
The Models tab
Section titled “The Models tab”From the Models tab you can download, cancel, unload and delete models, and Show in Finder. Problems with a model are flagged here too.
Where models are stored
Section titled “Where models are stored”Models live in the Hugging Face cache on your Mac. To store them somewhere else, like an external drive, click Move… in the Models tab. Herga stops its local server during the move, shows the progress, and starts again when it’s done. Reset moves them back to the default location.
You can also set the HERGA_MODELS_DIR environment variable to choose the folder.