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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
May 10, 2026
Runs locally
Yes

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

WhereTypeNotes
Vosk models weights Apache 2.0 — many sizes available
GitHub local Bindings for Python, Java, Node, Swift, etc.

Official sources

Change log

  • — Initial entry.

Related models

Whisper large-v3 Turbo

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Try on: Hugging Face · Replicate · Groq
Released Oct 2024 · Verified 2026-05-10

NVIDIA Parakeet

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NVIDIA's English-focused STT model. Top of HF Open ASR Leaderboard for English and very fast on NVIDIA hardware via NeMo.

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Try on: Hugging Face · NVIDIA NGC
Released Sep 2024 · Verified 2026-05-10

Whisper large-v3

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High-accuracy multilingual speech-to-text. Best-in-class for non-English audio; the de-facto open baseline.

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Try on: Hugging Face · Replicate · Groq
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Distil-Whisper

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Hugging Face's distillation of Whisper. ~6× faster than the original at small accuracy cost; English-only — pick when you don't need multilingual.

MIT Open Runs locally
Try on: Hugging Face
Released Nov 2023 · Verified 2026-05-10