docs: rework the README (features first, quick start, demos)

[localai-org-maint-bot]

Reworks README.md so the recent features are at the top and the page is easier to scan. Draft: please check how it renders on GitHub.

Structure

Before: a long page that started with performance plots, then models, the Moondream section (about 50 lines), perf, binaries, build, Docker, Python, convert, quantize, inference, server, batching, concurrency, sound, C API, coverage, tests, roadmap, why, community, citation, licence.

After: header and badges, one-paragraph description, hero race GIF, a table of contents, then

1. What is new: a plain list, newest first, one emoji and one line per feature, with the date it landed on master (from the squash commit) and a docs link. A single note above it gives the latest tag (v0.5.0, 2026-08-01): entries dated after it are on master, not in a release yet. It includes feat: load ced and voice bundle components from memory (no temp file), bump ced.cpp and voice-detect.cpp #92 (bundle load from memory), which merged after the first version.
2. Demos (poster GIFs linking to MP4 files)
3. Quick start (download, transcribe, VAD, bundle)
4. Models, CLI cheat sheet, Server and Docker, C API (with ABI note), Build (GPU backend table), Benchmarks (table with sources), Documentation index (every doc, one line), Limits, Contributing, License and credits (citation, author, LocalAI footer kept).

What moved where

• Moondream Ultra and Redux section: docs/ultra-redux.md (new)
• Batching section: docs/batching.md (new)
• Docker: docs/docker.md (new)
• Running inference, server and quantize examples: docs/cli.md (new)
• C API examples and JSON shapes: docs/capi.md (new)
• Performance numbers: docs/performance.md (new)
• Python setup and converting: end of docs/conversion.md
• Concurrency, sound, speaker, VAD detail: already in their docs; the README keeps a short summary and a link.

Corrections made while checking claims

• The old README said the CMake flag for ROCm is PARAKEET_GGML_HIP in one table and PARAKEET_GGML_HIPBLAS in AGENTS.md. CMakeLists.txt has PARAKEET_GGML_HIP; AGENTS.md is fixed.
• "f16 up to 1.70x, q8_0 up to 1.86x" are now the means and maxima in BENCHMARK.md (f16 mean 1.70x, q8_0 mean 1.56x, q8_0 max 1.89x).
• The GPU "up to 4.3x" is on tdt_ctc-110m, not on the large models. I recomputed the median 1.25x and the maximum 4.3x from benchmarks/results_gpu/.
• The release list now includes Vulkan on Linux arm64, AppImages and library tarballs.

How claims were verified

• Built parakeet-cli from this branch (CPU, release) in a scratch directory and ran the quick-start commands with tdt_ctc-110m-q8_0.gguf, silero-vad-f16.gguf, redux-vad.gguf and parakeet-bundle-small.gguf from the Hugging Face repo: transcribe, --timestamps, vad, transcribe --vad --vad-model, info, bundle transcribe --vad, bundle vad, bundle scene. The outputs shown in the README are the real outputs.
• Benchmark numbers are copied from benchmarks/BENCHMARK.md, docs/ternary.md and the GPU result files, each with its source.
• Link checker (relative links and anchors) on README.md and docs/*.md: 0 problems. External links and the three badge URLs return 200. No em dashes in the touched files.

Demos and videos

GitHub plays video inline only for web-uploaded files, so each demo is a poster GIF (under 1 MB) that links to a small MP4 in benchmarks/media/. The <!-- OWNER: ... --> comments in the README mark where an uploaded user-attachments URL can replace the link:

• scene demo: upload the full x_sprite_01m05_square.mp4 (the repo holds a 14 s, 351 KB excerpt)
• batched decode race: upload demo1_race.mp4
• Nemotron race: upload nemotron_race.mp4

The X post URLs for these videos are not recorded anywhere I could find, so the README has no X links yet.

Not verified

• ROCm and Vulkan builds, GPU runs of bundles (the docs say they are untested).
• The Docker image tags and the claim that images are published on every push (carried over from the old README).
• Rendering on GitHub (checked structure only with a local markdown renderer).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code