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Model · OpenAI · Speech-To-Text

Whisper large-v3 Turbo

OpenAI's distilled Whisper variant. ~8× faster than large-v3 with most of the accuracy retained — the practical default for high-throughput STT pipelines.

Modality
Speech-To-Text
License
MIT (Open)
Parameter size
809M
Released
October 1, 2024
Last verified
May 10, 2026
Runs locally
Yes

Strengths

  • Roughly 8× faster than large-v3
  • Retains most of large-v3's multilingual accuracy
  • MIT-licensed weights

Weaknesses

  • Slight quality regression on the hardest non-English audio
  • No speaker diarization

Try it

WhereTypeNotes
Hugging Face weights Open weights, MIT
Replicate hosted API key required
Groq hosted-api Free tier
whisper.cpp local C/C++ port; runs on CPU and Apple Silicon

Used in solutions

How-to Local-OK

Transcribe audio at scale on a local machine

Version history

  1. Whisper large-v3 Turbo Oct 2024 Current
  2. Whisper large-v3 Nov 2023
  3. Whisper large-v2 Dec 2022 Deprecated

Official sources

Change log

  • — Initial entry.

Related models

NVIDIA Parakeet

NVIDIA · Speech-To-Text

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

CC BY 4.0 Open weights Runs locally
Try on: Hugging Face · NVIDIA NGC
Released Sep 2024 · Verified 2026-05-10

Whisper large-v3

OpenAI · Speech-To-Text

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

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

Distil-Whisper

Hugging Face · Speech-To-Text

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

Vosk

Alpha Cephei · Speech-To-Text

An offline, lightweight speech recognition toolkit. Runs on phones, Raspberry Pi, and embedded devices — the right choice when Whisper is too heavy.

Apache 2.0 Open Runs locally
Try on: Vosk models · GitHub
Released Jan 2020 · Verified 2026-05-10