Open source transcription tools

Self-hostable transcription engines and desktop apps you can run yourself, with source you can read and modify.

11 tools · updated 2026-04-20
OpenAI Whisper
OpenAI

The reference open-source multilingual ASR model from OpenAI.

OSS · MIT ★ 98.1k
whisper.cpp
Georgi Gerganov

C/C++ port of Whisper — runs on anything, from a Raspberry Pi to Apple Silicon.

OSS · MIT ★ 48.8k
faster-whisper
SYSTRAN

4× faster than reference Whisper using CTranslate2 — production sweet spot.

OSS · MIT ★ 22.3k
whisperX
Max Bain

Faster-whisper + forced alignment + speaker diarization in one pipeline.

OSS · BSD‑2‑Clause ★ 21.4k
insanely-fast-whisper
Vaibhav Srivastav

CLI that transcribes 150 minutes of audio in ~98 seconds on an A100.

OSS · Apache‑2.0 ★ 12.4k
stable-ts
jianfch

Whisper with stabilised timestamps — more accurate word-level timing.

OSS · MIT ★ 2.2k
WhisperKit
Argmax

Swift Whisper for Apple Silicon — CoreML, Metal, zero dependencies.

OSS · MIT ★ 6.0k
distil-whisper
Hugging Face

Distilled Whisper: 6× faster, 49% smaller, within 1% WER of the teacher.

OSS · MIT ★ 4.1k
SeamlessM4T
Meta AI

Meta's speech-to-text + speech-to-speech + text-to-speech model, 100 languages.

OSS · NOASSERTION ★ 11.8k
Vosk
Alpha Cephei

Lightweight offline speech recognition for 20+ languages, runs on a Raspberry Pi.

OSS · Apache‑2.0 ★ 14.6k
Buzz
Chidi Williams

Cross-platform desktop app for Whisper — open-source MacWhisper alternative.

OSS · MIT ★ 18.8k