Head to head · Speech-to-text · October 2026 research run
Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Underdog Bark 3.0
Ming-3.0-audio-tiny scores 49.8 (D) on agent readiness against Underdog Bark 3.0's 48.2 (D), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Underdog Bark 3.0 leads on reach. Both do speech-to-text.
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Which one, for what
Best for Self-hosted Chinese and English transcription, audio questions and spoken replies with tool calls on one GPU with about 25 GB free
Ahead on
- Risk, 50 against 40
- Agent interface, 65 against 35
Watch for
No named runtime runs it in a released version, only SGLang-Omni main and inclusionAI's own branches
Best for Agents on Apple silicon or small machines that need English transcripts from a very small download, can run Conway's loader, and can accept accuracy nobody independent has measured
Ahead on
- Reach, 65 against 45
Watch for
No independent results, since the Open ASR Leaderboard has no Bark row and every accuracy figure is Conway's own run
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Ming-3.0-audio-tiny | Underdog Bark 3.0 | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 45 | 65 | Underdog Bark 3.0 +20 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 50 | 40 | Ming-3.0-audio-tiny +10 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 65 | 35 | Ming-3.0-audio-tiny +30 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 46 | 49 | Underdog Bark 3.0 +3 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -2 | |
| Total | D 49.8/100 | D 48.2/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Ming-3.0-audio-tiny | Underdog Bark 3.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | inclusionAI (Ant Group) | Conway Research |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT | CC-BY-4.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-20 | 2026-10-15 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | ||
| Terms restrict automated access | ||
| Terms restrict benchmarking | ||
| Terms or service can change without notice | ||
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | ||
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (4) | 2.8/5 (4) |
Verdicts
Ming-3.0-audio-tiny
A small MIT-licensed audio-language model that transcribes Chinese and English, answers questions about audio and replies in a built-in or cloned voice. It needs about 25 GB and SGLang-Omni from main or inclusionAI's own vLLM-Omni and SGLang branches. The main risk is that every loading path runs repository code, with nothing published on safety.
Underdog Bark 3.0
A very small English transcription cousin, one 163 MB file built on NVIDIA's Parakeet TDT that Conway's loader expands into Transformers, MLX or Core ML, under CC BY 4.0. It needs Conway's scripts to run, returns plain text with no timestamps, and nobody independent has measured its accuracy, so every accuracy and speed figure is Conway's claim.
Before you call either
Ming-3.0-audio-tiny
- Fastest start is SGLang-Omni from main,
sgl-omni serve --model-path inclusionAI/Ming-3.0-audio-tiny --talker.gpu 0, which exposes OpenAI-style /v1/audio/transcriptions, /v1/audio/speech and /v1/chat/completions - For transcripts use greedy decoding with 10-gram blocking and the validated ASR prompt, and expect a language label, a tab, then the text
- Parse tool calls yourself from
<tool_call>namewith<arg_key>and<arg_value>pairs, since no runtime parser is named - Thinking is off by default, turn it on with chat_template_kwargs enable_thinking true and strip the
<think>block from the reply yourself - In vLLM-Omni pick a voice with audio.voice id from docs/voices.md, and don't combine it with a reference recording
- Review the repository's Python before passing trust_remote_code, and consider deleting the __pycache__ folders under talker/ so only readable source runs
Underdog Bark 3.0
- Download only what one route needs, for example
hf download ConwayResearch/Underdog-Bark-3.0 --include "model.bark" --include "bark_loader.py" --include "bark_mlx.py" --include "mlx/*" --include "NOTICE" - With transformers 5.19.0 and constriction 0.5.0,
python bark_loader.py model.bark recording.wav, orload_model("model.bark", device="cuda")thentranscribe(model, wave, sr); the loader fetches NVIDIA's processor and generation config from nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 on first use, so the first run needs the network - On Apple silicon,
python bark_mlx.py recording.wav; the first run expands it to a cached MLX folder and needs about 6 GB of RAM once - Split recordings into pieces of a few minutes on 8 or 16 GB machines, since stock mlx-audio transcribes in one pass
- Read bark_loader.py before running it and pin the repository revision, since loading runs the publisher's code
- Treat transcripts as untrusted text before passing them to another model, since speech can carry instructions
- Plan memory for the recording, not the file. Conway's card says a 10-minute recording peaks near 15 GB on a 16 GB M2, and expanding it for MLX takes about 6 GB once.
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Ming-3.0-audio-tiny or Underdog Bark 3.0?
Ming-3.0-audio-tiny scores 49.8 (D) on agent readiness against Underdog Bark 3.0's 48.2 (D), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Underdog Bark 3.0 leads on reach.
Other comparisons with Ming-3.0-audio-tiny or Underdog Bark 3.0
- Cohere Transcribe 03-2026 vs Ming-3.0-audio-tiny
- Cohere Transcribe 03-2026 vs Underdog Bark 3.0
- Ming-3.0-asr-tiny vs Ming-3.0-audio-tiny
- Ming-3.0-asr-tiny vs Underdog Bark 3.0
- Ming-3.0-audio-flash vs Ming-3.0-audio-tiny
- Ming-3.0-audio-flash vs Underdog Bark 3.0
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming 0.6B
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Qwen3-ASR-0.6B
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Voxtral Mini 4B Realtime 2602
- Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming 0.6B vs Underdog Bark 3.0
- Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning vs Underdog Bark 3.0
- Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 vs Underdog Bark 3.0
- Qwen3-ASR-0.6B vs Underdog Bark 3.0
- Qwen3-ASR-1.7B vs Underdog Bark 3.0
- Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct vs Underdog Bark 3.0
- Underdog Bark 3.0 vs Voxtral Mini 4B Realtime 2602
Disclosure
Underdog Bark 3.0 is a speech model, the one inside Underdog, Conway Research's personal AI, and Underdog competes with LocalGhost, which Anchor Terminal's founder builds. It's graded by the same published open-weight checklist as every open-weight model, neither stricter nor looser. Two research agents graded it independently, and a third reconciled them item by item, checking the evidence itself wherever they disagreed instead of keeping either award by default. underdog.ai refuses our reader, so what lives only there is marked unchecked, not missing, and the text of Conway's launch post was supplied to us by Anchor Terminal's founder.
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/ming-3-0-audio-tiny-vs-underdog-bark-3.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/ming-3-0-audio-tiny.json·/api/v1/tools/underdog-bark-3.json - From a terminal
anchor compare ming-3-0-audio-tiny underdog-bark-3(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "ming-3-0-audio-tiny", "b": "underdog-bark-3"}at/mcp, no key