Model · Alpha Cephei · Speech-To-Text
Vosk
An offline, lightweight speech recognition toolkit. Runs on phones, Raspberry Pi, and embedded devices — the right choice when Whisper is too heavy.
- Modality
- Speech-To-Text
- License
- Apache 2.0 (Open)
- Released
- January 1, 2020
- Last verified
- September 8, 2026
- Runs locally
- Yes
What you need to run it
- Mac
- Yes. Any Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer) with at least 8 GB of memory. Newer chips are faster, but memory is what decides whether it runs.
- No graphics card
- Works. Runs on a normal computer's processor, just slower.
Runs on a plain CPU with no graphics card, including Macs, phones and a Raspberry Pi.
Numbers are for: small models (~50 MB); large server models use a few GB of RAM. Our estimate from the model’s size — the maker publishes no figure.
Strengths
- Runs on truly constrained hardware (mobile, Raspberry Pi)
- Streaming/realtime capable
- Apache 2.0 with mature SDK bindings
Weaknesses
- Accuracy below Whisper on hard audio
- Languages are downloaded as separate models — bigger languages mean bigger downloads
Try it
| Where | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Vosk models | weights | Apache 2.0 — many sizes available |
| GitHub | local | Bindings for Python, Java, Node, Swift, etc. |
Official sources
- Project site vendor
- GitHub github
Change log
- — Added hardware requirements (Mac support, memory, NVIDIA). Source: https://alphacephei.com/vosk/models.
- — Verified actively maintained — real feature commits through 2026-08-09, despite no tagged release since v0.3.50 (2024-04-22). The release gap is not staleness. No successor project exists.
- — Initial entry.
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